Dreams in Late Antiquity Studies in the Imagination of a Culture / Patricia Cox Miller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miller, Patricia Cox.

Series:

Mythos : the Princeton/Bollingen Series in World Mythology

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Filosofía antigua.

Sueños en la literatura.

Literatura clásica.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (292 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

[1st pbk. pr.].

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2021

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University, 1998.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Part I IMAGES AND CONCEPTS OF DREAMING

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE Figurations of Dreams

CHAPTER TWO Theories of Dreams

CHAPTER THREE Interpretation of Dreams

CHAPTER FOUR Dreams and Therapy

Part II DREAMERS

CHAPTER FIVE Hermas and the Shepherd

CHAPTER SIX Perpetua and Her Diary of Dreams

CHAPTER SEVEN Aelius Aristides and The Sacred Tales

CHAPTER EIGHT Jerome and His Dreams

CHAPTER NINE The Two Gregorys and Ascetic Dreaming

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [255]-270) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780691215853

0691215855

OCLC:

1227051585