the phantasmal past - time, history and the recombinative imagination

The Phantasmal Past:

Time, History, and the RecombinativeImagination

Nicholas WatsonHarvard University

The violence of the body reaches the written page only through absence,through the intermediary of documents that the historian has been able to seeon the sands from which a presence has since been washed away, and througha murmur that lets us hearbut from afarthe unknown immensity thatseduces and menaces our knowledge.

Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History

It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, asif future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way tothem at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in acertain house at a given time. And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, thatwe also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and isfor the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places andpeople who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Pastness

This essay is a sequel to an earlier one, published in 1999,which set out, by way of a meditation on Caroline Walker Bynumsgreat Holy Feast and Holy Fast, to imagine an alternative to the post-Enlightenment traditions of rationalist hermeneutics that dominate his-torical scholarship. Desire for the Past, as the earlier essay is called,suggests that, in order to come to a more compelling understanding ofwhat is at stake in study of the past, historians need to work with, aswell as on, the models of thought and feeling they study, adapting thesemodels for historiographic use in order to make visible the rich ex-

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changes between present and past that are an often-repressed feature ofour work.1

More specifically, the earlier essay shows how premodern conceptionsof affect might usefully inform the practice of historians. Medieval theo-ries of affect belong within a hermeneutic tradition, displaced to theesoteric margins by the Enlightenment, which thinks of understandingless in rational than in empathetic terms: as the product of a quest forunion with the subject of enquiry. Empathetic understanding is under-written by a double movement of identification and repudiation be-tween the unitary statement I am you and its silent shadow, I am not you.Considered as an empathetic endeavor, study of the past thus becomessomething like the mystics quest for union with God, and the essayends by suggesting that close attention to the affective protocols thatorganize such a quest for thinkers like Julian of Norwich might allowus to understand better, and make more articulate use of, our own pas-sionate investments in the past.2

Desire for the Past was intended as a thought experiment thatwould stand on its own as a consciously fervid contribution to the theo-rization of history. But questions have kept pushing their way out fromthe corners of the experiment, which cannot quite manage to ignore alooming issue larger than that of the individual scholars personal invest-ments in the past: that of contemporary cultures relationship to historyitself. Where is the past? What has happened to the past? Despite theadvances of historical scholarship, despite even the eruption of what theNew York Times persists in calling the medieval specter of fundamen-talism and other forms of eschatological terror into our new, so-soon-tarnished millennium, the past feels threatened, as though it were disap-pearing from the cultural imaginary of modernity as rapidly as the polarice caps are melting from the planet. Not only a matter of professionalconcern but a challenge to the ethical identity of all historians, as wellas a subject of consuming interest in its own right, the apparent vanish-ment of the past in our present, a phenomenon whose roots must, afterall, lie in the past, urgently needs to be understood and confronted.

1 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Foodto Medieval Women, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 2 (Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Desire for the Past, SAC 21(1999): 5998; reprinted with a new afterword in Maitresse of My Wit: Medieval Women,Modern Scholars, ed. Louise DArcens and Juanita Feros Ruys, Making the Middle Ages7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 14990.

2 Karl Morrison, I Am You: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theol-ogy, and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

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Medievalists might have a role to play here. Our lot is cast with thelast centuries of what we may call the deep human past, the epochwhose spectacular ending provides modernity with some of its most en-during myths of origin.3 The medieval is in a good position to standboth for the senses in which the past can be thought discontinuous withthe present and those in which such a thought is a contradiction interms. Unlike the early modern, an era still understood in teleologicalrelation to the present, the medieval is assumed to have had purposes ofits own, an identity not connected in any linear way with the present,notions about its own future quite different from the one we inhabit.Despite, or perhaps because of, the nineteenth-century investment inthe medieval as the source of nations, languages, and institutions, themedieval is also regularly vilified as obsolete, fantastic, foundational ofmodernity only inasmuch as modernity is taken to have established itsown heroic identity, its freedom from the past, through a violent, life-giving, mythical act of repudiation of the Dark Age from which itemerged.4

Considered as an ideology, modernity is a dogma at whose core is aset of beliefs about time (that time is uni-directional, progressive, andso on) in which the postmodern moment has also been heavily investedand which tend strongly to validate the as-yet-nonexistent future at theexpense of the past. Hence The New York Timess assumption that anyirruption of irrationality into the present is medieval, for, speakingdogmatically, the medieval is the discarded past: the decayed, gothicedifice on whose ruins were built the state, economic progress, secular-ism, and civil society.5 All this is, perhaps, obvious. But how did thisdogma arise? What are its implications for Western cultures relation-ship with its history? Medieval studies, with its partner, medievalism,needs to survive modernitys addiction to futurity in part just so that, inalliance with other historical disciplines, it can continue to press suchquestions.

In light of these concerns, the focus of Desire for the Past on schol-

3 On the sixteenth century as a repository of modernist myths of origin, see JamesSimpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).

4 See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Eu-rope (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).

5 A point also made by James Simpson, The Rule of Medieval Imagination, inImages, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, JamesSimpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 424.

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arly affect has come to seem too personal to have much bearing on thelarger challenge posed to our relationship with the past by modernity.At the same time, the earlier essays call to explore the historiographicpotential of other intellectual models derived from the premodern pastprompts this search for a new approach to the questions it raises.

The present essay thus reflects on the work of historythe work thepast does in the present but also the work done by historians in studyingand representing the pastthrough the body of medieval hermeneutictheory that concerns the imagination. The Middle Ages are often seen asa repository of the imaginary: an early nineteenth-century topos repack-aged not only by modern popular culture and the media but also byhistorians such as Jacques Le Goff in The Medieval Imagination.6 Yet incontrast to the theory of memory, medieval imaginative theory remainsso denigrated that few realize how the idiosyncratic roles played by theimagination in modernity are part of the legacy of the medieval past orappreciate the rational toughness that undergirds this legacy.7

The essay sketches a triple response to this situation: first, by gestur-ing toward the deep links between medieval imaginative theory and theidea of modernity; second, by musing on how this body of theory, withits intense focus on the complexities of any act of mediation, might serveas a guide to our work as historians; third, and at most length, by trac-ing the consciously innovative narrative forms this theory took in a seriesof speculative visionary works of the early and late fourteenth century.

6 Jacques le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1988), originally published as LImaginaire medieval: Essais(Paris: Gallimard, 1985).

7 Important recent studies of the medieval imagination include Mary Carruthers, TheCraft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 4001200, CambridgeStudies in Medieval Literature 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and,for the later period, Alastair Minnis, Textual Psychologies: Imagination, Memory, Plea-sure, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 2: The Middle Ages, ed. Alas-tair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 23974.For a general survey of the tradition from the Greeks to the Romantics, see J. M.Cocking, Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas (London: Routledge, 1992); stillmore wide-ranging is Eva T. H. Branns passionate historical encomium to the faculty,The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield,1991). Generally relevant to this essay are Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing Through theVeil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004);Sarah Kay, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French DidacticPoetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Although its topic is sight,not imagination, I have found also most suggestive Dallas G. Denery II, Seeing andBeing Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life, CambridgeStudies in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth Series 63 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2005).

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These English, Italian, and Latin investigations of the uses of the imagi-nation in constructing fictions, uncovering truths, and even constitutingrealities are at the heart of this investigation.

The more local aim of the essay is to argue that medieval imaginativetheory, like medieval empathetic theory, offers a viable way of thinkingto those of us whose business is with the past. The larger aim is tosuggest a new approach to what may be the single most importantassertion premodern historians should be making at present: that thepast matters, not only because it underlies the present, nor only becauseits unsuspected sophistication challenges its dismissal by the present,but because it remains inseparably entangled with the present and willcontinue to be so however much this fact is forgotten or its relevancedenied. The past may, perhaps, be in danger of vanishing from our cul-tural conversation, but it will not and cannot cease to exist in reconfig-ured forms. Only the mode of that continued existence is in question.

Like empathetic understanding, imaginative understanding first con-ceives of the object of inquiry in corporeal terms, and the starting pointof these reflections is thus the image of the past as a body evoked bythe epigraphs to this essay from Michel de Certeau and W. G. Sebald.8

But there the resemblances between empathetic and imaginative herme-neutics end. An empathetic approach to the past understands it as anabsent object of faith, possible to know only through something akin tothe blinde sterring of love by which, in The Cloud of Unknowing, thesoul reaches toward its unknown God.9 An imaginative approach to thepast depends not on its absence but, in some sense, on its presence,allowing us to think about that presence in ways that illuminate boththe pasts challenge to the dogma of modernity and its vulnerability tothat dogma. In so doing, it also gives us the tools we need to consider,from a new angle, the implications and urgencies of our discipline.

8 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1988), 11; originally published as LEcriture de lhistoire (Paris: Galli-mard, 1975); W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House,2001), 35960; originally published in German as W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Munich:Hansen, 2001).

9 The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Phyllis Hodgson, EETS o.s. 218 (London: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1934). Middle English quotations in this essay normalize thorn and yogh,u/v, i/j, i/y and c/t variation, capitalization, and punctuation, generally along lines pro-posed by H. A. Kelly, Uniformity and Sense in Editing and Citing Medieval Texts,Medieval Academy Newsletter 152 (Spring 2004). Latin quotations receive analogous nor-malizations.

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Phantasm

One consequence of thus thinking about the past as a body is that itprods the question of the ontological status of this past into unignorablevisibility. The status of past bodies themselves is not at issue. They aredead: part of the humus from which new bodies arise. But for scholarsdigging ever deeper into this past and thinking of it as a time in whichbeings not quite other than ourselves confidently inhabited their ownbodily presents, only a few hundred years behind and a few dozen inchesbelow where many of us now step, past time itself is not easily thoughtof as dead at all. Progressively opening itself to our gaze, refusing allattempts to fix it into permanent shape, through archives that, incom-plete though they are, create the illusion of inexhaustibility as we findnew questions to ask, new issues to explore, the past still seems latent:on the way into, not away from, the fullness of being that is the now,almost as though it were the future. Not real: the past is phantasmcompared to present actuality; is dependent on that actuality, on presentenergies and interests, to lend it what, at any moment, it has of life. Butstill existent, and in that sense having an actuality of its own, differentfrom that of the archive, which exists in the present, not the past towhich the archive acts as a thin bridge: both less and more, the nearlyliving spirit to the archives nearly dead letter.

Where does this spirit subsist? Among other places, in the branch ofthe cultural imaginary called scholarship. Underpinned by the memoryof the archive, tested and retested by research and debate, the mode ofexistence the past has is, in an exact sense, phantasmic. The past existsin the collective imagination.

Ever since Coleridge, writing Chapter 13 of his Biographia Literariaaround 1815, called the primary IMAGINATION the living Powerand prime Agent of all human Perception, and a representation in thefinite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM, theimagination has been linked to Romantic and, later, Modernist poetics,their elevation of the artist to a status next divinity, and their self-con-ception as evangelists of this new religion in the face of the dead weightof a past that failed to recognize its truth.10 While it would be wrongto blame most of this on Coleridge himself, a powerfully historical

10 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. JacksonBate, Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 7, Bollingen Series 75 (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1983), 304.

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reader and anti-elitist thinker, his eschatological proclamation of thecreative power of the primary and secondary imagination and relegationof the image-forming and -collating powers long associated with theimagination to the lesser, recombinative faculty of the fancy, com-pleted a rupture in the Wests understanding both of the imaginationitself and of the intellectual work associated with it.11

It is no accident, either that a long tradition of imaginative historiog-raphy flared up brilliantly, then died, a generation after Coleridge, withThomas Carlyles The French Revolution, Heroes and Hero-Worship, andFrederick the Great, or that all these works evince an idea of the past aseffectively awaiting its own obsolescence, capable of providing no morethan an enfeebled backdrop to the acts of the great men whose vastimaginative energies are credited with bringing the present into being.12

Creativity and the past, the powers associated with imagination andthose associated with memory and reason, were becoming antonyms,and the new empiricist historiography that in many ways still dominatesour work confirmed these fissures even as it traced the pasts rise tothe imperial present, relegating study of the past for the pasts sake toantiquarians. The point of this empiricist past resides mainly in the pres-ent, which in this new temporal order is separated from the past, bothin its presence and in the way it ultimately imagines itself, like Carlylesheroes, not back toward the past but forward into a future toward whichit triumphantly redirects its energies: the future of modernity.

To think of the premodern past as still subsisting in the culturalimaginary, as a phantasmal but active relict of an organism that onceenjoyed an existence fully independent of our present and its purposes,promises to unsettle these acts of self-differentiation from the past andperhaps to begin to reframe our relationship with it. An understandingof the past as phantasmal asks us to think horizontally, across the dividebetween present and past, not teleologically, up through the past intothe present. In so doing, it revives the very feature of the past mostsuccessfully suppressed and assimilated by modernity: the novelty of thepast, both as it was in itself and as we encounter it now, as though forthe first time, in a present that is, as Nietzsche long ago argued, the

11 See James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).

12 The French Revolution was published in 1837, Heroes and Hero-Worship in 1841, TheHistory of Friedrich II of Prussia (also Frederick the Great) in 1858.

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product as much of the pasts apparent destruction and forgetting as itis of the process of development framed by teleological historiography.13

The pages that follow reflect on the potentiality contained in the ideaof the past as a phantasm, and on the mode of historiography it enables,by developing some thoughts about the pre-Coleridgean imagination,the powers attributed to it, and its own association with novelty: thatis, both with the announcement or bringing into being of the new, andwith the concept of newness itself, one of the crucial underlays of theidea of the modern. The remainder of this section describes, in brutallygeneral form, the place of the imagination in late medieval psychologicaltheory. Subsequent sections then turn to what it calls the works of theimagination: the literary genres of dream poetry and vision in whichencounters with various modes of being are staged through the imagina-tive faculty and the danger and promise of such meetings are explored.Finally, a brief conclusion returns to novelty, modernity, and the loca-tion of the past, arguing that premodern imaginative theory offers away of thinking about the past and its relations with the present that isstill useful.14

Reginald Pecock, invoking a late medieval distinction between twolevels of imagination, argued that the office of the fantasye or higherimagination is forto forge and compoune [manufacture or combine],or to sette togedir in seeming, thingis whiche ben not togedir and whichmaken not oon thing in kinde. For The Cloud of Unknowing, imagina-tion is a might thorow the whiche we portray alle images of absent andpresent thinges.15 Some of the ways these definitions apply to history

13 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins,Little Library of the Liberal Arts 11 (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1949); originallypublished as Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fur das Leben in 1874.

14 It bears noting that, despite the attempts to police the specifically visionary imagi-nation from the fourteenth century on (see below), early modern theories of imaginationare closely related to their medieval predecessors, down to Hobbes in the mid-seven-teenth century, and to a considerable extent thereafter, as Engell, Creative Imagination,shows. For striking examples, drawn from a still largely untapped field, see Koen Ver-meir, The Physical Prophet and the Powers of the Imagination, Part I: A Case-Studyon Prophecy, Vapours, and the Imagination (16851710), Studies in the History andPhilosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 35 (2004): 56191, and The PhysicalProphet and the Powers of the Imagination, Part II: A Case-Study on Dowsing andthe Naturalisation of the Moral (16851710), in Studies in the History and Philosophy ofScience 36 (2005): 124.

15 Reginald Pecock, The Donet, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS o.s. 156 (London:Oxford University Press, 1921); Cloud of Unknowing, 117 (spellings slightly normalized,as is the case throughout this essay in Middle English and Latin quotations).

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will not be immediately apparent, while their invocation of the fraudu-lent in the words forge, seeming, and portray may, at first, evenseem actively unhelpful. Yet the association of the imagination in thesedefinitions with the collocation of evidence and re-creation of thingsabsent gives prima facie encouragement to an attempt to consider thefaculty in relation to history. What follows, then, is an exploration ofthe role of the imagination in medieval visionary and poetic makingwhose deepest concern is with its historiographic potential: with howsuch makings might be induced to offer us a vision of the work of his-tory as an urgent, ongoing, incompletable act of mediation betweenpresent and past.

Mediation is of course the main function of the imagination in medievalpsychological theory, as the five outer senses transmit impressions of theexternal world through the sensus communis to the cellula imaginativa inthe front of the brain, which generates meaning-bearing images capableof being sorted and stored by the other inner senses, judgment andmemory, in the cellula estimativa and cellula memorativa. Despite differ-ences in terminology and changes over time, here physicians trained onGalen, scholastic thinkers like Pecock, and hermits brought up to lectiodivina like the Cloud-author all agreed. Writing just after 1300, for ex-ample, John of Morigny invoked this basic model in a prayer for knowl-edge of rhetoric in his Liber florum doctrine celestis:

Aperi, Domine, cor meum, mentem meam, et cerebrum perfectum tribus cell-ulis, ut in prima et in anteriori parte omnia visa et audita velocissime queamimaginari, in secunda omnia imaginata racionari possim, et que racionata suntultima perpetue conservet memoria.

Open, Lord, my heart, my mind, and the cerebrum perfected in its three cells,so that in the first and anterior part [of the first cellula] I may be able veryswiftly to form images of everything seen and heard, in the second I may beable to interpret everything thus imagined and in the last memory may perpet-ually conserve the things thus interpreted.16

16 John of Morignys Flowers of Heavenly Teaching, ed. with translation and commentary,Claire Fanger and Nicholas Watson (in preparation), II.ii.23.5. For information aboutthis work, see the essays by Claire Fanger, Richard Kieckhefer, and Nicholas Watson inConjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic, ed. Claire Fanger, Magicin History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), although allthese essays have been partly superseded by subsequent research and by further manu-

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There were many disagreements in working out the details of thismodel: over the extent to which the imagination was truly a faculty, avis imaginativa, rather than a mere transmitter of images, as it was forPlato; over the imaginations ability to create by recombination imagesnever presented to it by the senses, especially in dreams; over its role,particularly in Avicennan models, as an instrument of divine revelation,as a mediator between heaven and earth, as well as the material and themental; and over how the inner senses interact with the soul, comprisedof the faculties of reason and will and considered to be nonlocalizedbecause noncorporeal. But even though some of the positions taken onthese issues give the imagination true cognitive functions, they all sharean awareness of the ambiguous standing of images and the faculty thatgenerates and recombines them: an awareness that, it is proper to say,constitutes an organizing principle for medieval imaginative theories. Aswe shall see, indeed, it is the field of possibilities opened up by theambiguous status of the medieval imagination, its powers, effects, andtruth claims, that constitutes its usefulness to historiography.17

The difficulty of thinking about the imagination, even in the seem-ingly strictly physiological terms that Chaucers Knight invokes in de-scribing Arcites love-manie, Engendred of humour malencolic, /Biforen, in his celle fantastic, is that it exists so close to the boundarybetween corporeal and spiritual, crossing and recrossing that boundary,both in a real sense, as it mediates the external world to the soul, andin a theoretical one, classified as it effectively is on both sides of thedivide.18 Like the other inner senses, imagination is part of the soul, buta part humans share with animals: dying and, in the case of humans,

script discoveries. For a preliminary edition and translation of the first part of the text,see Claire Fanger and Nicholas Watson, John of Morigny, Prologue to Liber Visionum[c. 13041318], Esoterica 3 (2001): 108217, http://www.esoteric.msu.edu.

17 For a lucid introduction to late medieval psychology in the Aquinan tradition, seeSimon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,1996). More fine-tuned analyses are also available, and, in their interest in the changesin cognitive theory that took place in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, areof considerable potential relevance to this essay, although their findings are not invokedhere: see esp. Katherine Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham (Leiden: E. J.Brill, 1988); Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996). The major issues at stake across the millenniumseparating Augustine from the end of the medieval period are treated in AnthonyKenny, Medieval Philosophy, volume 2 of his A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 2005), chap. 7, pp. 24151. See also his Aquinas on Mind, New Topicsin Medieval Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993).

18 Canterbury Tales I.137576. Quotations, with spelling adjusted (see note 9 above),from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

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being raised with the body, as Aquinas argues in the Summa.19 As such,it participates both in the limitations inherent in materiality and themore severe ones produced by the Fall, which disordered the physicalcreation and turned the border between matter and spirit into a sceneof intense cosmic battle. Essential but unreliable, imagination is thusfigure and symptom of the miseria condicionis humanae, the wretchednessof being human, at an especially deep level. Indeed, according to Aqui-nas, it is precisely the role played by the image-making and -storingfaculties of imagination and memory that distinguishes imperfecthuman intellection from the perfect mode possessed by the angels, whorequire neither faculty. Angelic being is all but constituted by an intel-lect that, turned to God by an act of will, intuits imageless truths in aperpetual present, direct from the divine mind.20

For humans, by contrast, imageless truth is a category under ex-treme strain even within the discourse dedicated to theorizing it, apo-phatic theology. True, the influential Augustinian concept ofintellectual vision seems to offer a ground to stand on for those deter-mined to argue for a mode of human perception that carries certitude.But Augustinian Neoplatonism did not translate well for the later Mid-dle Ages, and most assumed with a visionary like Julian of Norwichthat visio intellectualis (gastelye sighte) was still visual, dependent onimages stored in memory and derived from imagination.21 Bifore erman sinned, was imagination so obedient unto the reson . . . that itministrid never to it any unordeinde [disordered] image of any bodelycreature or any fantasy of any goostly creature, states the Cloud. Evenfor the unfallen Adam, however, truths were conveyed to the intellectusthrough images, created effects, as Aquinas asserts and even August-ine reluctantly concedes.22

19 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Prov-ince (New York: Benziger, 1948), I.77.

20 Ibid., I.54.21 Julian of Norwich, Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman

and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, Brepols MedievalWomen Series (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), e.g., Reve-lation, chap. 9. Gostely sight is clearly imagistic for Julian, differing from bodilysight in its transmission directly into her mind, rather than via the mediation of imagesperceived through the senses. For the history of visio intellectualis and its late medievaldecline, see Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

22 Cloud of Unknowing, 117; Summa theologica, I.94; Augustine, The Literal Meaning ofGenesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, Ancient Christian Writers 42, 2 vols. (New York:Newman Press), XII.33. For analysis, see Gerard ODaly, Augustines Philosophy of Mind(London: Duckworth, 1987), 10630; Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, Topics inMedieval Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993), 3140.

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For medievals, the mind could thus attain knowledge and under-standing only as a result of its repeated penetration by images assembledin a faculty whose liminal position between body and spirit and sheeraccessibility to medical and philosophical as well as theological dis-courses showed it vulnerably porous to diabolic interference, deteriora-tion as a result of disordered postlapsarian desire, and perceptual error.

It is no wonder that, as Mary Carruthers has so richly shown, suchconcentrated attention was focused in the contemplative tradition onthe management of sense impressions and their orderly translation intoimages stored in the memory. At its most intense, such attention shapedevery aspect of monastic life, from the architectural and pictorial spacewithin which it was lived, to the round of chant, song, and movementthat was the liturgy, to the private reading, meditation, and prayer thatconstituted monastic recreation, even, so far as this was possible, to theregulation of sleep.23 In this regime, the intrusion of inappropriate im-pressions on the imagination slid easily into sin. Yet since imaginativeactivity was of the body as well as the soul, failure to ensure enoughimpressions, good or bad, led to something worse: the partly physiologi-cal condition of boredom, accidia, a stagnant pool of immobile images,induced by the noon-day demon, that to all but the inertly despairingsufferer was a clear harbinger of damnation.24

Nor is it surprising that this environment should generate a prolifera-tion of visionary experiences and technes, vigorously promoted or pro-scribed by different schools of clerical thought as the science of discretiospirituum was developed, especially from the early fourteenth century on,in conjunction with the methodologies of the inquisition, that searcher-out of the false imaginatiouns of heretics.25 Nor, despite this, that latemedieval efforts to extend contemplative models to the laity shouldargue that the imaginatioun of the life of Criste was a potentially sal-

23 See Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, a sustained exposition of monastic orthopraxis(1) in relation to such practices as meditation.

24 See Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. RonaldL. Martinez, Theory and History of Literature 69 (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1993); originally published as Stanza: Le Parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale(Turin: Einaudi, 1977).

25 See Rosalynn Voaden, Gods Words, Womens Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in theWritings of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries, York Medieval Press (Cambridge: Boydelland Brewer, 1999): Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in theMiddle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Fe-male Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2004).

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vific substitute for the vanitees of the worlde that constantly sought toinfiltrate their lived experiences, as Nicholas Love argued in the Mirror ofthe Life of Christ.26 Loves understanding of the imagination was at onceactive, aimed at generating devotion, and defensive, aimed at stoppingup the senses by offering alternate images to the vis imaginativa, thusturning the mind into a mental cell. As Ancrene Wisse would put it, Lovemade it possible for ordinary lay readers to wite wel thin heorte, forsaule lif is in hire, yef ha is wel i-loket (guard your heart well, since thesouls life resides in her, if she is well locked), skillfully updating anancient tradition of self- and soul-care.27

Tidinge

Those who policed the medieval imagination thus did so by workingwith it, providing it with sensory data that had been culturally approvedas worthy of a permanent place in the memory in advance of any judg-ment made by an individual souls rational power. This might seem aninherently conservative, innovation-refusing pedagogical process. Butthe medieval imagination was not just a translator of sense impressionsinto images. In dreams, visions, fantasies, and states of creativity associ-ated with poetic or artistic making, it was a locus of mental activity inits own right. In the intricate mental space of the higher imaginationof the fantasie in particular, images rise up thickly from the storehouseof the memory or are admitted anew by way of the senses. There, theymysteriously combine and recombine to form previously unknown ob-jectsmarvels, inventions, novelties, monsters, engines, and all mannerof other constructs, thingis whiche . . . maken not oon thing in kinde,as Pecock put itwith or without the effectual aid of the reason. Anywriters who sought to make these unpredictable processes into theground of art or speculation were opening the door to a mode ofthought necessarily quizzical, wayward, and innovative: as distant fromthe security of Loves imaginatioun as from Coleridges harmless fancy.The threat represented by the recombinative imagination was quite asevident to these writers as its energetic potentialities. Indeed, in some

26 Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition,ed. Michael G. Sargent, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter: Exeter UniversityPress, 2005), Prologue.

27 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Bella Millett, EETS o.s. 32526 (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 20056), II.34.

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of the most exuberant imaginative works this threat becomes a majortheme.

Such is the case, for example, with Chaucers presentation of thelabyrinthine, creaky, rapidly whirling House of Rumour in his eccen-tric and eloquently incomplete dream poem, The House of Fame.28 TheHouse of Rumour is located immediately adjacent to the orbitingmountain of ice atop which stands the House of Fame itself, whereinthe historical understanding of noteworthy deeds and the nature oftheir place in the collective memory, if any, is determined by the un-predictable, possibly arbitrary, decisions of Fame, fama, herself. Noth-ing even this dignified takes place in the House of Rumour: its roofpitted with holes, its walls basket-woven of twigs, and the whole sup-ple edifice as full of doors as of leves ben in trees / In somer, whanthey grene been, all of which stand open day and night for news ofall kinds, tidinges of deeds notable and unnotable, real and imaginary,to enter and leave at will (194647).

An image aimed at the heart of the eremitic model of the guardedsoul that Ancrene Wisse derived, ultimately, from Cassians Collationes, theHouse of Rumour is an imaginative faculty operating in the absence ofany guiding influence from reason: ramshackle, viridescent, unjudg-mental, and earthbound. Whirling like a watermill (to use Cassiansuseful analogue), the House is powered by a constant stream of sensoryimpressions that it instantly manufactures into phantasms, which repre-sent at once the fleeting impressions of consciousness and the collectivetittle-tattle of uncensored social observation we call gossip, and whichcrowd together, exchange their single tidbit of news, then thrust theirway back into the world again.29 So prolifically does this engine of im-ages gather them in, then pump them out, that its random productivityoutdoes even the generative powers of Nature and the destructive pow-ers of her rival, Death:

28 The reading offered here is especially indebted to Steven F. Kruger, Imaginationand the Complex Movement of Chaucers House of Fame, ChauR 28 (1993): 11734,and Ruth Evans, Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and TheHouse of Fame, SAC 23 (2001): 4369.

29 See John Cassian, Conferences, trans. Colm Lubheid, Classics of Western Spirituality(Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1985), Conference 1.18: This activity of the heart iscompared, not inappropriately, to that of a mill which is activated by the circular motionof water (exercitium cordis non incongrue molarum similitudini comparatur quas me-atus aquarum praeceps impetu rotante provolvit; J.-P. Migne, ed. Patrologia Latina,vol. 49 [Paris: Migne, 1874], col. 507b).

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But which a congregatiounOf folk, as I saugh rome aboute,Some within and some withoute,Nas never seen, ne shal ben eft;That certis, in the world nis leftSo many formed be Nature,Ne ded so many creature . . .And every wight that I saugh thereRounede everich in others ereA newe tidinge prively.

(203445)

Hammer away at her forge as she may, sweep away with his sickle as hedoes, the numbers of creatures Nature and Death shape and destroyrepresent only a fraction of the numbers of homunculi born of each word,each eyeblink, in the cellula imaginativa.

According to standard medieval ethical and religious discourses, therecould be many ways of categorizing the causes and products of thiskind of imaginative activity: as good or evil, real or illusory, spiritual orcorporeal. Yet The House of Fame makes it clear that moral, epistemologi-cal, and ontological ambiguities are intrinsic to the newe tidinges thatare the principal work of the imagination in this unstructured dreamingmode. As the House of Rumour shakes its endless crop of tidinges outinto the world, throwing them off in ever-increasing numbers, some ofits images bear truths, some falsehoods, while others, changed by theirjostling conversations and squeezed by the pressures that build up inex-orably within this profligate mental machine, bear both:

. . . Thus north and southeWent every word fro mouth to mouthe,And that encresing ever mo,As fir is wont to quicke and goFrom a sparke spronge amis,Til al a citee brent up is . . .And somtime saugh I tho, at ones,A lesing and a sad soth-sawe,That gonne of aventure draweOut at a windowe for to paceAnd, when they metten in that place,They were a-checked bothe two,

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And neither of hem moste out go;For other so they gonne crowde,Tile eche of hem gan cryen loude,Lat me go first!Nay, but let me!And here I wol ensuren theeWith the nones that thou wolt do so,That I shal never fro thee go,But be thin owne sworen brother!We will medle us ech with other . . .Thus saugh I fals and sooth compounedTogeder fle for oo tidinge.

(2077109)

Given this ability of the fantasie to combine images, or inability to keepthem separate, it seems that the power of the imagination to multiplyphantasms is exponential.

In describing a mode of mental activity no more subservient to theestimativa (figured perhaps in the instant judgments made in the Houseof Fame) than it is to the memorativa (figured perhaps by the Temple ofGlass earlier in the poem, with its images from the Aeneid), Chaucerpushes his account of the generative imagination to a characteristic ex-treme.30 Just as the images spun by the imaginativa exist in an uncertaincondition between matter and spirit, body and soul, so the tidinges thatare their content exist in an uncertain condition between fals andsoth: their status phantasmic, their mode of being merely their facticityas cultural phenomena.

Yet in the endless circulation of tidinges between earth and theheavenly House of Rumour, tidinges do more than reflect, in more orless distorted form, the truth of what is done and said. Chaucers simileof the sparke spronge amis argues that they are dangerously capableof helping to create what is done and said, destroying mighty civilizationsthrough mere reportage, then carrying the news of that conflagration,outrageously varied, back to the shoddy heaven of Rumour to start theprocess anew.

For all that fact and tidinge instantly become indistinguishable, it

30 Seemingly decorous because the Aeneid also lurks behind the Houses both ofFame and Rumour, and because Chaucer famously imports (and develops) an OvidianDido into the Virgilian scene. See Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England: Figur-ing the Aeneid from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Litera-ture 24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 6.

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is thus tidinges, more than the slow work of institution-building oracts of individual heroism, that, in this imaginary cosmos, are seen tobring about change through time. Coming between events and theirafterlife, tidinges generate differences between one moment and thenext by recasting the soth of an event within an endless array of alter-native versions whose very variance makes its own impact on what hap-pens next. This is an unpredictable process in which, despite thepersistence of a kind of cause and effect, any ability to track causality issoon lost. Thus does the fals become soth as well as the other wayabout; and thus is the future built of the same, fungible but undyingphantasmic material that enables the past to survive, constantly trans-formed, into the future. It is just this effortless capacity of the recombi-native imagination to throw off novelties, disrupt orderly continuities,slide the present into seemingly tangential futures, that the monasticcultivation of the imagination was designed to quell, and that strikesreaders of The House of Fame now as irresistibly prophetic of modernity:the time of the reign of the future and of the omnipresence not of thenatural but of the image.

Read alongside a good deal of contemplative writing in the monastictradition, Chaucers account of the disruptive power of unregulatedimaginative activity is radical, at least to the extent that we understandit as celebration, not satire, energizing Chaucers future projects even asit brings The House of Fame itself to a grinding halt. Nonetheless, thepoems frankness about the ambiguity of imaginative activity is not un-usual. On the contrary, we shall see that similar ambiguities are culti-vated by those in whom, or by whom, works of the imagination like TheHouse of Fame are performed.

The two, overlapping genres of writing tied most closely to the gener-ative imagination and in which the promise or threat of novelty is mostreal are the dream poem and the religious vision: those twin genresof geographical, intellectual, and epistemological exploration BarbaraNewman has shown to be central to the production of the speculativetheological constructs she terms imaginative theology.31 The rest ofthis essay meditates on episodes from three further texts in both genres.These texts appear to make very different demands on epistemological

31 Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), esp. 2434.

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certitude. But in practice they share Chaucers sense of the intrinsic am-biguity of the image or tidinge, moving in related ways between oneconception of themselves as truth-bearing, perhaps inspired, and an-other as fictional, while insisting as clearly as Chaucer on the power, thepotential efficacy, contained in the image. Part of the point here is toenrich our conception of the medieval imagination by emphasizing theextent to which it was assumed to possess creative as well as mediativecapacities, albeit capacities different from those the Romantics were toclaim for it, residing as they do for medieval thinkers within the mediat-ing function Coleridge was to call fancy, not in opposition to thatfunction. Understood as the power that brings tidinges, false and true,into the world, whether by generating the unnatural images that com-bine in the cellula imaginativa in dreams or by acting as the vehicle forthe entry of prophetic truths into the world from the spiritual realm,the medieval imagination indeed forms an essential part of the historyof novelty, which is also part of the history of the modern.

Part of the point, however, bears directly on the essays earlier reflec-tions on imagination and historiography. Here medieval thinking aboutthe imagination as creating by recombination is considerably more help-ful than Coleridges fantasy that the work of the imagination can some-how echo the divine act of ex nihilo creation. For medieval imaginativetheory admits not only the crucial role imagination plays in all thought,whether based on observation of what exists without the self or reflec-tion on what lies within, but also the consequence of that role: thatthought, observation, and reflection are all products of fals and sothcompouned, so that our perception of all reality, past, present, andfuture, can never be anything other than a negotiation between the falseand the true. In the encounters with other worlds staged in dreams andvisions, the possibilities for truth and error, certainty and speculation,represented by Chaucers fals and soth are indeed combined andrecombined, as each is successively shown to be a medium for the other:equally necessary to thought and to the apprehension of whatever modeof reality is in question, but never susceptible of orderly hierarchization,fully definable relation, or final synthesis.

Novita`

The first episode is a passage from a poetic text that stops just short ofannouncing itself as a dream poem, Dantes Inferno, from the symbolic

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center of its thirty-four cantos: the passage at the end of Canto XVIwhere Dante and Virgil begin their descent from the Seventh Circle (thelast of the circles of force) to the Eighth Circle (the first of the circles offraud), by summoning the monster Geryon from the obscure depths ofthe great cliff that separates these subdivisions of hell and down whichhe will later carry them, swimming through the gloomy air in great,wheeling circles.32 Geryon, described at the beginning of Canto XVII asthe sozza imagine di froda (foul image of fraud), is a nightmare prod-uct of the recombinative imagination, with a saintly human face (facciaduom giusto), the paws of a beaver, a serpents body painted all overwith knots and whorls (nodi e rotelle) like a Persian carpet or a weav-ing from Arachnes looms, and the stinging tail of a scorpion (XVII.718). Summoned by a previously unimagined method, the novo cenno(new sign) of a rope loosed from Dantes waist (XVI.10614), and intro-duced as a novita` in his own right, Geryon becomes the centerpiece of acarefully constructed textual aporia through which Dante articulates hisunderstanding of the epistemological status of this first stage of his po-etic project, while also reflecting on the impossibility of knowing truthstraightforwardly through the imagination:33

E pur convien che novita` risponda,dicea fra me medesmo, al novo cennoche l maestro con locchio s` seconda.Ahi quanto cauti li uomini esser diennopresso a color che non veggion pur lovra,ma per entro i pensier miran col senno!El disse a me: Tosto verra` di sovracio` chio attendo e che il tuo pensier sogna:tosto convien chal tuo viso si scovra.Sempre a quel ver cha faccia di menzognade luom chiuder le labbra fin chel puote,pero` che sanza colpa fa vergogna;ma qui tacer nol posso; e per le note

32 Quotations and translations are from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. andtrans. Charles S. Singleton, 6 vols., Bollingen Series 80 (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 197075), vol. 1.

33 On Geryon, see Roberto Mercuri, Semantica di Gerione: Il motivo del viaggio nellaDivina Commedia di Dante (Rome: Bulzoni, 1984). On the summoning of Geryon bymeans of a cord, see Christopher Bennett Becker, Dantes Motley Cord: Art and Apoc-alypse in Inferno XVI, MLN 106 (1991): 179183, with bibliography, although theinterpretation given here differs considerably from Beckers.

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di questa comed`a, lettor, ti giuro,selle non sien di lunga grazia vo`te,chi vidi per quellaere grosso e scurovenir notando una figura in suso,maravigliosa ad ogne cor sicuro,s` come torna colui che va giusotalora a solver la`ncora chaggrappao scoglio o altro che nel mare e` chiuso,che n su` si stende, e da pie` si rattrappa.

(XVI.11536)

Surely, I said to myself, something strange will answer the strange signalwhich the master follows so carefully with his eye.

Ah, how careful one should be with those who not only see the deed, buthave the wit to read ones thoughts! Soon will come up what I look for andwhat your mind dreams of, he [Virgil] said to me; soon must it be discoveredto your sight.

To that truth which has the face of a lie a man should always close his lipsso far as he can, for through no fault of his it brings reproach; but here I cannotbe silent; and, reader, I swear to you by the notes of this Comedyso maythey not fail of lasting favorthat I saw, through that thick and murky air,come swimming upwards a figure amazing to every steadfast heart, even as hereturns who sometimes goes down to loose the anchor that is caught on a reefor something else hidden in the sea, who stretches upwards his arms and drawsin his feet.

The ver cha faccia di menzogna, the truth with the face of a lie,here is Geryon, a lie with the face of a truth, whose maravigliosaarrival from below, a figura swimming through the air, is so unlikelythat Dante stakes the success of his poem on its veracity, in the processnaming the poem a comed`a for the only time. As he does so, thepoem becomes entangled in the winding beauty and stinging tip ofGeryons fraudulence, introduced as he is at the exact halfway point ofthe Inferno like a sinister or comic revelation of the poems fictionality.At the same instant, fraudulence threatens to undo even itself throughits representation by an imagine that reveals, through the partial legi-bility of its monstrosity, the truth about Geryons falsity: a truth thepoem can only make manifest if it continues to assert its own veracity,naming Geryon not as a shadow self but as an eternal, mendacious op-

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posite. This is the childish terrain of the Cretan paradox: Is the trueimage of fraud true, or does its truth make it fraudulent?

Epistemology and ontology labor under conditions of compromise inhell, a place whose human inhabitants, like Geryon himself, are con-demned to the eternal absurdity of their chosen inauthenticity. Since inChristian theology sin is no more than an absence, a privatio boni (priva-tion of good), sinners unite themselves substantially with a principle ofnonbeing when they disorder their souls into the shape of one of theforms of evil. Even though their sufferings still take a grossly measurablecorporeal form, words like veracity and reality thus cannot strictlyapply to them or their habitation, deformed as even their spirits havebecome into an obscene simulacrum of bodilyness.

But hell here is also a name for a complex sequence of images, someof which are caught, in this passage, in the moment of their generationin Dantes imagination, as one of those images, Virgil, describes himselfas waiting for Dante to imagine another, Geryon, in the faculty Virgilcalls the pensier: Tosto verra` . . . cio` . . . che il tuo pensier sogna(Soon will come up what I look for and what your mind dreams of ).Virgil sees not only Dantes deeds but the flow of images that are histhoughts (non veggion pur lovra, / ma per entro i pensier miran colsenno), and it is as he gazes on these that they formulate the figurawho becomes, at first only through simile, the image of Geryon.

What, then, is Geryon? On the one hand, he is a product of therecombinative imagination, knit together from the pool of images avail-able to Dantes mind by the rope he throws down to summon him andby his pensier, described here as dreaming. The final simile suggeststhat Geryon first appears less like something arriving from below thanlike something returning to Dante and Virgil after slipping an anchorthat has become snagged. Such a view of his role is consistent with anunderstanding of the Inferno as a fiction in which Geryon essentiallyrepresents an involuted rhetorical solution to a literary problem: theproblem of how to represent fraud in a poem that, in its fictitious depic-tion of a real otherworldly place, itself inhabits a space dangerously closeto the uncertain barrier separating invention from fraudulence.

On the other hand, however, the passage also supports the readingthat Dantes imagination prophetically apprehends Geryon, as it does therest of hell, including Virgil himself. When Virgil announces Geryonsimminent arrival (tosto convien chal tuo viso si scovra [soon must ituncover itself to your sight]), he does so in language that assumes

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Geryons objective being, using a phrase (si scovra) that derives fromthe terminology of revelation and lends support to the improbable oathDante then takes that all he describes is true. Not that this oath iswithout cost. The price of the strange dalliance with lying (menzogna)played out through the passage is the shame (vergogna) that someonewithout fault can feel, Dante notes, at how closely truth resembles fal-sity: a striking linkage between the visionary imagination and the expe-rience of embarrassment, an emotion that is equally associated with beingwrongly suspected (by a lie) and being caught out (by the truth). Ver-gogna both inhibits and, when it has to, obliges speech, here in theform of an oath grounded in the mere note from which the narrativesituation is constructed; an oath, then, and a shame, as involuted asthe lying truth of Geryon himself. Even in his attempt to overcomevergogna, it seems that Dante cultivates epistemological uncertainty,allowing the work of the imagination to unanchor itself from the con-straints of rationality, since only so can his poem truthfully convey theontological conditions under which beings of pure fraudulence mightpersist.34

In the process, he not only summons one of his poems most compel-ling series of imaginative novelties: a mythological helicopter as redolentof the technological marvels that are a principal product of the recombi-native imagination in modernity as any of Leonardo da Vincis propheticdoodles. He radicalizes the distinctive late medieval visionary under-standing of the fictive, deploying Chaucers moral language of sothand fals in a moral environment so harsh that these opposing catego-ries must be understood as mutually constitutive, not merely indistin-guishable, and in which forward progress is possible only through thesolidification of an impossible object, a fraud, the novita` Geryon. A no-tion of the fictive akin to that found in that essential, fraudulent moderngenre, the novel, hovers nearby.

At the end of The House of Fame, Chaucer offers a vision of history inwhich reconstructing the truth and trajectory through time of any eventin the past would involve the collation of endlessly dispersed voices

34 On the close relationship between imagination and shame in medieval psychologi-cal theory, see Ernest Kaulbach, Imaginative Prophecy in the B-Text of Piers Plowman(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 6566; Nicolette Zeeman, PiersPlowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2006), 14647.

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whose rumorous falsifications appear so powerful as to overwhelm nor-mal models of historical causality, if indeed they do not constitute abizarre version of that causality. Not that historical collation could everkeep up with such a proliferation of images or offer any workable recon-struction either of the event or its afterlife, given the fundamental irre-sponsibility of cultural processes as described in this poem, the absolutepowerlessness of memoria or other sources of auctoritee. All the histo-rian might ever achieve in this world would be the production of yetanother set of recombined images: an outcome Chaucer chooses not torepresent, preferring the suicide of the interrupting blank page, the endof imagination, to any attempt to sift the cultural bric-a-brac his dreamquest has uncovered for usable nuggets of truth.

At the center of Inferno, Dante is no more sanguine than Chaucerabout the possibility of separating truth and error, at least in the corro-sive conditions of hell. But where Chaucer abandons his quest to earnthe right to plant a kiss on the next laure I see in gratitude to Apollo(House of Fame, 1107), Dante plows on, red-faced, using the fictive andmendacious materials that lie to hand to forge the machine that willcarry him down the abyss to confront yet darker images of the fraudu-lent. Sustained by the presence of Virgil, on the one hand, and thepromise of Beatrice, on the other, Dante has resources unavailable toChaucer. Here the images he summons to constitute hell solidify as hepasses through into the shapes of giustizia (III.4), frozen into meaningby narrative need, bold acts of historical interpretation, and theologicalhypothesis.

Historians, like artists, are familiar with those stalled moments whenthe great gulfs of evidentiary lacunae, of aere grosso e scuro, threatento block our progress, and with the dubious methodological technolo-gies it is necessary to assemble from whatever lies to hand in order tocontinue. Indeed, as de Certeau implies in the first epigraph at the be-ginning of this essay, the fragments washed up on the written pageof the archivea page his beachcombing image suggests may be asterrifyingly blank as the nonconclusion of The House of Famethere isnever any other way to translate the murmur we may still just hearof the unknown immensity that is the violent, bodily past than tosummon Geryon, the figura of fraud, to our aid. To produce new work-ing models of the past capable of resonating with that immensity, andso bring it into such presence as it may have, we must speak for, as wellas of, it, and in the process involve ourselves in the ethical uncertainties

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attendant upon invention; on our projection of our own dreams ontothe past; on our embarrassed knowledge that the vehicle we create tocontinue our journey is not really a truth about the past but a novita`, anassemblage of images of the past into a form that never was.

Experimentum

The last two sections of this essay turn away from the rhetorical tradi-tion as exemplified by Chaucer and Dante, in which engagement withfraud is, in a sense, a matter of course, and in which it is claims to truththat constitute the serious problem, to read passages of two visionarywriters who might be thought particularly sensitive to threats to factic-ity, John of Morigny and Julian of Norwich. Establishing a clear rela-tionship between facticity and fraud is crucial to Johns so-calledexperimentum visionis habende (experiment for having a vision), whichserves a series of functions in his Liber florum doctrine celestis (book of theflowers of heavenly teaching), a complex tripartite work of visions, pray-ers, and experimenta, written in two versions at Chartres and Morigny inthe early fourteenth century, at the same time as Dante was writing theCommedia.35

If for Chaucer in The House of Fame the vis imaginativa has a correspon-dence with the human world as consensually constructed through theendless repetition of tidinges, and if for Dante it has a useful correspon-dence with the phantasmagorical ontology of hell, for John of Morigny,as for many religious visionaries, the imagination is the unreliable butvitally important borderland between the beings that people earth andheaven. This borderland was coming to be fiercely patrolled in the early1300s, as the science of discretio spirituum was systematized around abelief that any error in communication between divine and human waslikely to be diabolically inspired and would bring ruin in its wake: abelief that may have been a factor in the condemnation of the Liberflorum, which was burned in Paris in 1323.36 For John, however, the risk

35 Johns use of the term experimentum derives from his principal source, the Ars noto-ria. Both the phrase experimentum visionis habende and the experiment itself have ana-logues in medieval ritual magic texts, but no immediate source has been identified. Theversions of Liber florum contain an array of dates difficult to arrange in a clear way, butit seems to have been begun around 1301 and was completed in October 1315.

36 Enthralling testimony to the emergence of a hermeneutics of suspicion as John waswriting is provided by the De spiritu guidonis, whose second, expanded version by JeanGobi dates from the mid-1320s. See Jean Gobi, Dialogue avec un fantome, trans. Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1994).

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of error was acceptable, partly because the project around which heevolved the experimentum visionis habende, his method of communicationwith heavenly beings through the imagination, was so urgent to him,partly because he did not share the dualistic understanding of errorgaining ground in the literature of discretio spirituum.

The experimentum is a system for generating meaningful dreams, typi-cally involving apparitions of the Virgin and exchanges with her initi-ated by the operator, which can be predicted to occur in response to aset of divinely inspired rituals involving recitation of certain prayers,inspection of certain images, and a prayerful focus of the mind at thepoint of sleep on questions to which one desires answers. These answersare then revealed in the same part of the mind the rituals are designedto prepare, the cellula imaginativa.37 Although it is the reason that framesthe questions and interprets their answers, the experimentum is itself aproduct of the imaginativa, both in its focus on dreams and inasmuch asits prayers and figures were created under the guidance of the samevisionary process they generate; the most important experimenta concerngaining permission to write or use the prayers that will then, inter alia,enable further experimenta. This process renders the entire pyramidalconstruct experimental in a proto-scientific sense, since any error madein analyzing a given experimentum can be corrected through further exper-imenta, even if the error is diabolical in origin.38

The dreams are as varied as their status as products of the recombina-tive imagination would suggest. But many of them fit a common pat-tern in which an image of the Virgin appears to the dreamer, not in theflesh but rather as an artwork, most often a statue that may then changeor half-change into flesh, moving, gesturing, speaking, within thedream itself in response to the operators desires and needs:

Et aliquando apparet virgo Maria ante portam ecclesie . . . aliquando in obviamdum itur ad ecclesiam; aliquando in ecclesia in loco suo ubi imago suaponitur. . . . Et aliquando apparet in forma regine nobilissime; aliquando in

37 Crucial is the recitation of a set of prayers (the Seven Prayers) that John composedwhile attaining his own vision of Mary with a specific visionary prayer, O revelatrix,and preexisting liturgical prayers such as O intemerata; see NC III.i.1015. (Refer-ences to Liber florum distinguish between Johns two versions, the Old Compilation [OC]and the New Compilation [NC], only in parts of the texts where these differ, i.e., wherethe New Compilation discarded portions of its predecessor or added its own material.)

38 The first part of the work, The Book of Figures and Preparations (Prologue) is anaccount of the composition of the Seven Prayers central to the production of visions.

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forma religiose mulieris pulcherrime; aliquando in forma nativitatis Ihesu; ali-quando in imaginis sue forma nova et depicta . . . aliquando in forma antiquaet deleta ab omni pictura. . . . Aliquando pulchra, aliquando turpis. . . . Ali-quando loquitur et aliquando non vult loqui. . . . Et aliquando videtur et ali-quando non, set vox eius auditur. Aliquando in alto loquitur, aliquando in imo,ita quod vox eius est quasi sibilus aure tenuis, et vix auditur.

(OC I.iv.10)

Sometimes the virgin Mary will appear before the church door . . . sometimesin the path on the way to church, sometimes in the church, in the place whereher image is located. . . . And sometimes she appears in the form of the noblestqueen; sometimes in the form of a most beautiful nun; sometimes in the formof the nativity of Jesus; sometimes in the form of her newly painted image . . .sometimes in an ancient form with all the painting rubbed away. . . . Some-times beautiful, sometimes ugly. . . . Sometimes she speaks, and sometimes shedoes not wish to speak. . . . And sometimes she is seen, and sometimes not,but her voice is heard. Sometimes she speaks in a high voice, sometimes in alow one in such a way that her voice is thin as a whisper in the ear, and isscarcely heard.

What the Virgin says, or how she says it, or the gesture that she makeswith hand, foot, shoulders, or eyebrow, then provides raw material forinterpretations that assume a great deal, from the fact that the dreammust be understood supernaturally to the pertinence of a dream to thequestions that frame it. These questions the dream may not explicitlyanswer or even ask, since the operators own behavior within the dreamis, for reasons to do with the nature of dreaming itself, as unpredictableas is that of the Virgin:

Opifex vero, quando apparet ei, tunc aliquando genibus flexis rogat eam utloquatur secum, loquendo aliquando in alto, aliquando in imo; aliquandoflendo, aliquando ridendo; aliquando per plura verba, aliquando per pauca,aliquando per nulla.

(OC I.iv.10)

But the operator, when she appears to him, then sometimes on bent knees asksher to speak with him, speaking sometimes in a deep voice, sometimes in a highvoice; sometimes weeping, sometimes smiling; sometimes with many words,sometimes with few, sometimes with none.

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In interpreting this difficult imaginative material, the operator mustthus use the rational language of exegesis and disputation to mold itinto the desired form. This is a highly interventionist process in which,if the Virgin promises something tomorrow (crastina die), she can beunderstood to refer to next year, while her refusal to allow somethingadhuc benedicemus tibi (until we shall bless you) gives implicit per-mission to act now (NC III.iii.2, NC III.i.4). When the Virgin respondssmilingly non to a question and holds her foot out to be kissed, theoperator may proceed as though her smile implies a qualified no, or, inother words, a provisional yes (OC III.3). Conversely, when she givespermission quasi invitus et graviter et quod se tederet loquendo (asthough unwillingly and heavily and as if she tired herself by speaking),the operator accepts the permission but understands her reluctance as acounsel of delay (I.ii.5).

The Liber florum uses similarly drastic techniques in arguing its ownvalidity in the face of its critics, interpreting Gratians claim that dreamsproduce only illusions a contrario sensu as implying the opposite of whatit says:

Quod [ista sciencia] sit stabilis, sancta, et vera . . . potest probari auctoritateilla canonum . . . unde dicitur, ex turpi enim cogitacione vigilantis oritur illusioluxurie in mente dormientis. . . . Ex quibus verbis datur intelligi a contrario sensusubtiliter intuenti: quia ex munda et pulchra cogitacione vigilantis oritur veritas casti-tatis summa in mente dormientis. . . .39 Set ista sciencia ex ineffabili et pulchracogitacione vigilantis in contemplacione imaginis Virginis gloriose et rerumsuper celestium. . . . Ergo sequitur ex hoc quod oriatur visio veritatis in mentedormientis, et ita patet in animo a sompno excitato visionem veritatis vidissenon illusionem fantasticam.

(NC III.i.5)

For that [this science] is stable, holy, and true . . . can be proved by the author-ity of the canon where it is said, the illusion of lust arises in the mind of the dreamerfrom his sinful thoughts when awake. It is possible to those of subtle understandingto understand these words in the opposite sense: that out of the pure and beautifulcogitation of the waker is born the truth of highest chastity in the mind of the sleeper.But this science consists in an ineffable and beautiful cogitation on the part ofthe waker, in contemplation of the image of the glorious Virgin and of super-celestial things. . . . Thus it follows from this that a vision of truth is born in the

39 From Gratians Decretum, Pars I, Dist. VI, Cap. 1(PL 187: 41).

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mind of the sleeper, and so it is clear that a vision of truth, not a fantasticillusion, is seen in the mind by the awakened sleeper.

The strong claims made for the prophetic content of dreams here sug-gest how important it is to the Liber florum, whose success depends onthe ultimate viability of the imagination as an instrument of the visioveritatis, to distance the experimentum visionis habende from the epistemo-logical ambiguities Dante finds himself obliged to embrace, lest theshape-shifting Virgin be revealed as only another manifestation ofGeryon.

Despite its quest for certitude, however, the Liber florum makes itclear that the mode of the experimentum has a vexed and provisionalrelation to truth, for two reasons. First, the Virgins appearance indreams must be carefully vetted for diabolical deception. When she ap-pears not in a church but in a place unclean, filthy, dark and of illrepute, as in a tavern, or ditch, or dark cavern, or in a brothel (im-mundus, sordidus, obscurus et diffamatus, ut in taberna, vel fossa, velcaverna obscura, vel in lupanari), or incites lust in the operator, clearlyall she says and does will be evil (OC I.iv.10). But even true visions maycontain a whiff of the diabolic, an intermingling of truth and error.Sometimes the Virgins true appearance is followed by a deceptive one;sometimes Virgin and demon actually appear together, the latterspeaking first with her permission, always falsely persuading againstsalvation (preveniens verba illius, ea permittente, semper contra sa-lutem fallaciter persuadens), in a test of the operators faith, hope, andcharity (NC I.iv.3). Interpretations of dreams thus always stand to becorrected by new evidence, improvements in the operators understand-ing of a dream and the balance of good and evil within it, or changes inexternal circumstance.

Second, the dreams themselves are in any case explicitly constructs,generated by a collaborative process of creation, in which the operatorsimagination, under the Virgins guidance, invents a shape for her in theform of a work of devotional art, which then enables her to communi-cate, imperfectly but urgently, with his mind. Indeed, it is said to beonly in such constructed forms that such heavenly beings as the Virgin,the saints, even Christ himself are able to manifest themselves to hu-mans on earth:

Christus, Maria, sancti, et angeli, secundum formam in qua hominibus appar-ent, in ipsis est ficta transmutatio, quia alio modo nobis apparere non possunt;

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sed secundum naturam divinam et essenciam in qua sunt et in perfeccioneeterna manent. Tunc apud ipsos nulla est transmutatio nec vicissitudinis obumbratio(Jas. 1:17). Et hec que prediximus . . . cum ista vel aliquod predictorum videris,scias et cognoscas me verum dixisse et in nullo mentitum fuisse.

(OC I.iv.10)

With regard to the form in which Christ, Mary, the saints, and angels appearto human beings, they undergo a fictitious transmutation, since they cannotappear to us in any other way; but with regard to the divine nature and essencein which they exist, they still remain in eternal perfection. So where they arein themselves there is no transmutation nor shadow of vicissitude (Jas. 1:17). Andabout these things which we have just said . . . when you see these things oranything of the aforesaid, you may know and understand that I have spokentruth and lied in no respect.

Despite the echoes of the Pygmalion story (or the resurrection of Hermi-one in The Winters Tale), there is a clear hierarchy of creation here, withthe operator responsible only for a deaf and dumb idol that the Virginturns into a speaking image by animating it with miraculous life. Yetthe passage also offers a suggestive understanding of the obscurity ofthe Virgins appearances as produced by difficulties on both sides of thedivide between earth and heaven, human and divine: as a kind of static,caused by the vast spiritual distances being bridged and the fallibilityand openness to diabolic interference of the place where the bridge isbuilt, the operators dreaming imagination.

The truth about the experimentum of the shape-shifting Virgin is thatit is no lie (me . . . in nullo mentitum fuisse) but a meaning-bearingfictional (ficta transmutatio), inherently vulnerable to error, throughwhich the Virgins voice may indeed be heard no louder than a whisper(quasi sibilus aure tenuis). Hence the open-endedness not only of theexperimentum John passes on to his successors, who are free, with theVirgins guidance, to take his heavenly research in new directions, butalso of the Liber florum itself, despite its real artistry. For all its claims toan unusually collaborative form of divine inspiration, the Liber florumprovides little new knowledge but rather a method of study, endlesslysusceptible of improvement, in which the imagination is at once theprincipal medium through which knowledge may pass and a barrierwhose partial impermeability both constitutes and symbolizes the gulfbetween earthly contingency and the eternal truths in which nulla esttransmutatio nec vicissitudinis obumbratio.

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* * *Operators of the Liber florum, then, are very much like historical scholars,understanding the figurae they fashion for the Virgin and the meaningsthey find in her manifestations merely as models, hypotheses, alwaysliable to be supplemented and corrected by new data once they areavailable. These figurae offer a necessary environment in which thesearch for that stable yet flexible thing, truth, can continue, but it isalso only a temporary one. Times change; new evidence emerges; newneeds demand new questions; the Virgins baffling responses to thesequestions in turn require that they be reunderstoodmuch as historicalhypotheses, often also based on present concerns, may initially be re-buffed by the evidence of the archive, but then be given back to thehistorian in a form made over, as the study of the past again transformsthe present.

Meanwhile, the medium itself, the mode of investigation, is suspectin ways that can be isolated neither from the manner in which the pastsurvives nor from the biases of the historical operator. Yet according tothe Liber florum, the Virgin must address the needs and desires of opera-tors in the present, albeit in her own, obstinately slant way. This is notin the end becauseher being elsewhere, where nulla est trans-mutatioshe can reach into the present only as a phantasm madeof present needs and desires. To reason thus, as John says, secundumauctoritates physicas naturales (according to the authorities of the nat-ural sciences), is possible only by sacrificing the operators sense of theindependent coherence and truth of the phenomena (OC I.iv.10). In thesame way, to think of the construction of the past as no more than aprojection of modernitys needs and desires, doing away with any traceof the metaphysical, carries the cost of eliminating any sense of thepasts once-separate identityany sense that in its many and variousmodes of manifestation it still exerts pressure on the present.

Not that we can rely on the past we can apprehend through experi-mentum to be benign, tell us helpful truths, or tell us truths at all. TheVirgins manifestations may be demonic, not divine, and will as often asnot be both. In the second epigraph at the beginning of this essay, fromSebalds last great fictional study of the catastrophic interpenetration ofEuropes past and present, Austerlitz, the eponymous hero insists thatthe past, an object of almost extinguished but just recoverable memory,might still serve as a meeting place between modernity and its history,the place where we keep, so to speak, our appointments . . . in the

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past. But even though Austerlitz lives in mortal need of what the pastcan and does tell him, the novel also represents the encounter with thepast as the product of chance or grace as much as of effort or receptivity.What is more, the truth that perhaps redeems Austerlitz also destroyshim; for Sebald, modernity needs its rapprochement with the pastmainly because only so can it understand the violent sources of its ownimmeasurable destructiveness. In the search for historical truth throughthe mode of urgent and demanding summoning that is experimentum,only the persistence of question and answer, not the result, is certain.

Shewing

If Chaucer understands the imagination as a vital but explosively unpre-dictable engine of a vision of history whose lurching progress takes placeunder the sway of tidinges, not orderly event, Dante and John ofMorigny use the faculty to move beyond the here and now into far-distant places whose status is in important ways non-natural, havingeither almost infinitely less, or almost infinitely more, of being. Theirprojects serve different ends and their emphases fall in different places.Where Dantes use of the terminology of truth and fiction constructs ananxious literary aporia to demonstrate the impossible epistemologicalstrain under which his poem labors, John, resisting total collapse intouncertainty, insists on the partial possibility of reaching truth throughfiction by repetition and elaboration of visionary experimenta. Yet the twowriters share an understanding of the capaci

the phantasmal past - time, history and the recombinative imagination

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