Dreams, Visions, and Spiritual Authority in Merovingian Gaul

In early medieval Europe, dreams and visions were believed to reveal divine information about Christian life and the hereafter. No consensus existed, however, as to whether all Christians, or only a spiritual elite, were entitled to have a relationship of this sort with the supernatural. Drawing on a rich variety of sources—histories, hagiographies, ascetic literature, and records of dreams at saints' shrines—Isabel Moreira provides insight into a society struggling to understand and negotiate its religious visions.Moreira analyzes changing attitudes toward dreams and visionary experiences beginning in late antiquity, when the church hierarchy considered lay dreamers a threat to its claims of spiritual authority. Moreira describes how, over the course of the Merovingian period, the clergy came to accept the visions of ordinary folk—peasants, women, and children—as authentic.Dream literature and accounts of visionary experiences infiltrated all aspects of medieval culture by the eighth century, and the dreams of ordinary Christians became central to the clergy's pastoral concerns. Written in clear and inviting prose, this book enables readers to understand how the clerics of Merovingian Gaul allowed a Christian culture of dreaming to develop and flourish without compromising the religious orthodoxy of the community or the primacy of their own authority.

Overall there is much to recommend in this book. The author's willingness to tackle a vast chronological range (the fourth through the eighth centuries) and her ability to place her research within the larger corpus of the excellent secondary work on late-antique and early-medieval oneirology... are impressive. The result contributes significantly to Merovingian history in general, and to the fields of gender, asceticism, and mysticism in particular., This is an admirable book: vastly learned, and clearly written with a happy turn of phraseology... Dr. Moreira is to be congratulated on her book., This is an intriguing book... (Isabel Moreira) holds that the visionary experiences that ordinary people had in the ancient world came to pose a threat to those who held power in the church during late antiquity....Moreira argues that the church in Merovingian Gaul taken to begin in the fourth century did not squeeze out ordinary Christian dreamers, but accommodated them....this book... is argued with unremitting intelligence and richness of illustration, and expressed in pleasing prose., Isabel Moreira's book is an excellent survey of the functions of visions in early medieval Gaul, and of their capacity to resolve the very tensions they created., This book will take its place alongside the earlier works by Raymond Van Dam and Giselle de Nie, illuminating that world for both the general reader and the specialist.

Isabel Moreira is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah.