ARTH 290B Medieval Visions Dechant Spring 2024

Course Description

What did it mean to “see” in the Middle Ages? The question is more complicated than it first appears. At all levels of society, from kings and popes to ordinary people, visions, apparitions, and dreams played a much greater role in medieval life than they do today. The act of looking itself could be a source of power, destruction, love, or religious devotion. Dreams could foretell the future or bring messages from the dead. Religious visions could alter the trajectory of a person’s life or even the course of history. This class will examine the related concepts of sight, visions, and visionary experiences during the medieval period (c.500-1500). We will focus especially on the ways that images and visual culture helped shape, interpret, and transmit medieval ideas about vision and visions, and our subjects will include, among other topics, material lighting devices, representations of nature, maps of the world, dream imagery, records of religious visions, and depictions of the apocalypse.