The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception

by Carolly Erickson

Nine interrelated essays explore visionary imagery informing the middle ages. This exceptionally readable book describes how medieval men & women perceived their world, & how their vision of it colored their ideas about natural & supernatural occurrences & their attitudes about land, property, government, the role of women, crime, lawlessness & outlaws.
Preface
1 Enchanted world
2 Visionary imagination
3 Canons, monks & priests
4 Image of belief
5 Land & rule
6 Power of kings
7 Forces of disorder
8 Vision of women
9 Epilogue: Web of verities
Notes
Suggestions for further reading
Index

Genres: History, Medieval, Essays, Nonfiction

247 pages, Hardcover

First published February 12, 1976

About the author

Distinguished historian Carolly Erickson is the author of The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette, The First Elizabeth, Great Catherine, Alexandra and many other prize-winning works of fiction and nonfiction. She lives in Hawaii.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/caroll...

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a multi-layered exploration of the medieval mode of thinking. Bounded by its own form of reasoning, logic, and rationale, world-views are thus best approached by trying to dig into the heads of past folks and see how they thought. Particularly, Erickson focuses on how imaginative, visionary experience reflected not a literal understanding of an invisible world, but the grafting of the binary beliefs together. Basically this is a combination of the eye and the mind's eye, for lack of a better analogy. Erickson deftly goes through the motions and there are some good, healthy discussions here on religious, political, and, to a limited extent, local/folk perceptions of the world-structure. My favorite, five-star bits were the sections on chaos/crime and the role of women's views in the medieval world. I slice off a star because Erickson gives you all this wonderful information but only hesitantly pursues any kind of historiographic conclusion. Everything comes of as tentative at best, but the discerning reader can see the potential re-visualizing of the period behind what she presents.

[Ena Alvarado · Rating 5 out of 5]

« For what keeps us most in ignorance of history is the fact that we know too much about it that is wrong. It is the assumption that basic human experience does not vary from one age to another, and that the twelfth century shared a common perceptual vocabulary with the twentieth. To approach the manifold reality of the middle ages is to realize that this judgment is flawed to the point of serious distortion. Understanding the past means first discarding these inaccuracies as well as others built up through literary and cinematic stereotypes. It means trying to re-create a holistic view of existence that has not been generally held for four centuries. Most important, it means recapturing a perception of ideas and events in terms of an all-encompassing design. »

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's difficult to believe that I read this over a decade ago as portions of it remain outstanding in memory. More particularly I was struck by a exposition she makes early on about popular belief in the devil during the Middle Ages. Rather than just quote some theologians of the period, people who might have been as much committed to professional lying as many politicians and business leaders are today, she cites the many recorded cases of persons taking Satan, or one of his troupe, to court. Yes, apparently they did and the courts generally took them seriously, sometimes ruling contracts made by the plaintifs as null and void, thereby, hopefully, saving their souls.

This, presuming no exaggeration on Erickson's part, struck me as offering an insight into the pre-modern mentality. Judging by the judicial records, Satan was no abstraction of belief or some entity expected only to appear at the end of days. A lot of people met the celebrity. Just like most of us haven't met the president, we likely know someone who has, or have heard from a friend of someone who has, or perhaps have heard, or seen ourselves, a distant figure publicly acknowledged to be the president. So it was then. The evidence was ample. Of course, we have the media, photographs and videos and voice recordings to assist our reality checking. They didn't. Thus it was in earlier times that after the death of a Roman emperor--someone whose visage would only be known from idealized art, mostly on coims-- pretenders would appear at some distance from the capitol itself, claiming to be him and seeking to raise armies to regain their positions. Sometimes they did--raise armies at least.

The rest of the book was like this. The author, a novelist as well as an historian, is very good at making the past seem to come alive.

[Briana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't realize the subtitle is more relevant the the primary title here. I was expecting the book to focus on vision/visions, but the book is actually about "vision" in the very broad sense of "How did medieval people view kings/women/monks/etc."

[Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Carolly Erickson provides a unique perspective of medieval vision in this collection of essays assorted into chapters. Sometimes the style of the essays prevents a fluid read, but most of the chapters have interesting insights. Chapter eight of this book is aligned with the feminist movement of the 1970s so I could not overlook the blatant feminist theology which harms the significance of this collection.

[Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Currently reading. Intelligent survey of medieval perception.

[Belle Meade School]

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