"Patricia Cox Miller should be commended for having cast her net wide. Her book, indeed, represents the first sustained effort to present and analyze the place of dreams in the culture of the Roman Empire, from the second to the fifth centuries... By studying together pagan and Christian dreams, Cox Miller hopes to reach a better understanding of some fundamental patterns of late antique culture."--Guy G. Stroumsa, The Journal of Religion "A fluent and discursive text... This is an adventurous exploration of a range of material which deserves to be more widely known."--Gillian Clark, The Classical Review
Dream interpretation was a prominent feature of the intellectual and imaginative world of late antiquity, for martyrs and magicians, philosophers and theologians, polytheists and monotheists alike. Finding it difficult to account for the prevalence of dream-divination, modern scholarship has often condemned it as a cultural weakness, a mass lapse into mere superstition. In this book, Patricia Cox Miller draws on pagan, Jewish, and Christian sources and modern semiotic theory to demonstrate the integral importance of dreams in late-antique thought and life. She argues that Graeco-Roman dream literature functioned as a language of signs that formed a personal and cultural pattern of imagination and gave tangible substance to ideas such as time, cosmic history, and the self. Miller first discusses late-antique theories of dreaming, with emphasis on theological, philosophical, and hermeneutical methods of deciphering dreams as well as the practical uses of dreams, especially in magic and the cult of Asclepius. She then considers the cases of six Graeco-Roman dreamers: Hermas, Perpetua, Aelius Aristides, Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianus.
Her detailed readings illuminate the ways in which dreams provided solutions to ethical and religious problems, allowed for the reconfiguration of gender and identity, provided occasions for the articulation of ethical ideas, and altogether served as a means of making sense and order of the world.
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Dream interpretation was a prominent feature of the intellectual and imaginative world of late antiquity, for martyrs and magicians, philosophers, polytheists and monotheists alike. This book draws on pagan, Jewish, and Christian sources and modern semiotic theory to demonstrate the integral importance of dreams in late-antique thought and life.
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AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationPt. IImages and Concepts of DreamingCh. 1Figurations of Dream14Ch. 2Theories of Dreams39Ch. 3Interpretation of Dreams74Ch. 4Dreams and Therapy106Pt. IIDreamersCh. 5Hermas and the Shepherd131Ch. 6Perpetua and Her Diary of Dreams148Ch. 7Aelius Aristides and The Sacred Tales184Ch. 8Jerome and His Dreams205Ch. 9The Two Gregorys and Ascetic Dreaming232Bibliography255Index271
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780691058351
Publisert
1998-01-11
Utgiver
Vendor
Princeton University Press
Vekt
425 gr
Høyde
235 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, U, 06, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
288
Forfatter