Tasting the milk of celestial knowledge. Note about the rhetoric of the portrayal of the sacred in Alonso Cano’s painting The Lactation of St. Bernard (1653–1657) from the National Gallery in Prague

This is an attempt of interpretation of a picture that draws from mystical tradition. It is about the comprehension of a topic in a painting by the Spanish artist Alonso Cano (1601–1667, Granada), from the National Gallery in Prague (O 14 690) Lactatio S. Bernardi – presenting the miracle of lactation, in which the Virgin Mary is squirting milk from her breast into the mouth of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (a historically very famous saint and major representative of the Cistercian Order). Traces of iconography lead up to the Coptic Church, where the typology of the milking Virgin was probably first originated (Galacto Trofusa in Greek or Maria lactans in Latin). The starting point is perhaps the portrayal of the virgin goddess Isis milking her son Horus. In many cultures, milk symbolises physical and spiritual food (e.g. the Milky Way evoking the ancient myth about spurted divine milk). On the other hand, milking is also present in the Old Testament as the image of special blessing; it is a symbol of eternal beatitude and wisdom. The dream/vision of her milk is then – apart from the rest – a sign of abundance, fertility, love, and fullness. The lactation of St. Bernard is an allegory of the penetration of the divine science in the soul. Thanks to this act the saint receives God’s guide, which he can then discharge into his writings.

Why Dreams Mattered in Late Antiquity

The introductory chapter outlines the standard methods of approach that have been adopted in post-Foucauldian scholarship on dreams and their cultural importance. It reviews the history of recent scholarship on dreams and the various methods of approach to modern and pre-modern dreaming, including the gender studies perspective adopted here. It defines key terms such as ‘dream-vision’ and ‘divination’, and introduces the main themes of the chapters to follow. The study of the three monotheistic traditions—rabbinic Judaism, Byzantine Christianity, and early Islam—together in this volume shows the many ways in which dreams and spiritual authority were inextricably linked across the various cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. Ancient religious approaches to dreams are contrasted with modern psychoanalytic and social psychology approaches. The book adopts an ‘ecumenic perspective’ on dream interpretation, treating it as a shared ideology of pagans and monotheists in the East and West. An ecumenic perspective focuses on the common idea that the prophetic dream carried a message from the realm of the divine, rather than focusing on what prophetic dreams can tell us about the dreamer’s subconscious mind. The chapter offers a summary of the scope of the study and of the contents of the remaining six chapters.

Thinking Fantasies: Visions and Voices in Medieval English Secular Writing

The creative engagement with visions and voices in medieval secular writing is the subject of this essay. Visionary experience is a prominent trope in late medieval imaginative fiction, rooted in long-standing literary conventions of dream vision, supernatural encounter and revelation, as well as in medical, theological and philosophical preoccupations of the period. Literary texts repeatedly depict supernatural experience of different kinds—dreams and prophecies, voices and visions, marvels and miracles, otherworldly and ghostly visitants. In part, such narratives respond to an impulse towards escapism and interest in the fantastic, and they have typically been seen as non-mimetic. Yet they also engage with serious ideas concerning visionary experience and the ways in which individual lives may open onto the supernatural—taking up the possibilities suggested both by dream theory and by the theological and psychological models of the period. Examples drawn from a range of Middle English romances and from Chaucer’s romance writing demonstrate the powerful creative potential of voices and visions. Such experiences open onto fearful and fascinating questions concerning forces beyond the self and their intersections with the processes of individual thinking, feeling and being in the world, from trauma to revelation to romantic love.

Old Books and New Beginnings North of Chaucer

Starting from the claim that Chaucer’s profoundest legacy to his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century successors was his dynamic, dialogic use of literary form, this chapter shows how the two Scottish works that most fully respond to him (The Kingis Quair and Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid) use their textual frames to revise Chaucer’s unsettling modes of mediating a story. They do so in particular to shape new beginnings of and altered endings to familiar genres and stories. Adapting framing modes from Troilus, the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament, and even the Canterbury Tales, The Kingis Quair (attributed to James I of Scotland) remakes the Boethian dream vision as an optimistic celebration of faithful heterosexual love. Revising Chaucer negatively, Henryson’s Testament brings beginnings and ends together by inserting itself into a narrative gap in the final book of Troilus, audaciously framing itself ‘within’ and ideologically prying open a prior work.

Metaphorical Codes of S. Parajanov’s Movie Text “Sayat Nova” (1969)

The article under studies deals with theoretical and practical discourse of the issue of cinema metaphor. It emphasizes that certain investigations of the issue are carried out in terms of theory, in the aspect of typology of cinema metaphors. The article also analyzes the ways of their creation and their impact on the recipient; in the cases of moving to the practical plane, particular attention is drawn to the analysis of either individual cinema metaphors or to the peculiarities of cinema metaphors of individual authors. The film “Sayat Nova” (“The Color of Pomegranates”) has been considered in the above aspect. The author of the article distinguishes a few detailed cinema metaphors that most clearly demonstrate the deep receptive potential of visual reading of this movie text. The key metaphorical codes in this case are wine, pomegranate, water, book, ladder, ritual, sheep, dream, vision, thread, lace, and poet. Particular emphasis has been laid on the fact that the he author's methods of creating cinema metaphors are polymorphic in their nature. Some of them contain a deeply conceptual, symbolic meaning, which is formed due to the context and can be expanded because of additional connotations arising during the perception of “cinema metaphors”. Others are formed as a result of a montage combination of two or more frames, through the use of purely cinematic means (for instance, shooting angle, close-up, sound, color) or involvement of viewer’s receptive experience in the course of perception.

Book III

This chapter envisions the Wake as part of the tradition of dream vision literature. Beginning with the first critical writing on the Wake that sought to contextualize the book as such, and reassessing more contemporary views that the Wake is not part of the genre, the chapter lays out the tradition from the origins of English poetry and demonstrates Joyce’s adaptation and conformity with it. Part of the chapter engages Giordano Bruno’s extensive writings on dreaming and sight. The chapter takes into consideration the end result of dreaming—awakening—and situates the Wake as an aubade as well as an example of dream vision. In so doing it connects Joyce’s work to possible sources of inspiration, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Bishop, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Dream of the Rood, and Richard Rolle, and looks into the criticism of Derek Attridge, Edmund Wilson, and John Bishop.

The River Goddess and Melody-Makers in Nigeria: A Cultural View on Majek Fashek and Victor Uwaifo

The art of music-making is a mental/creative activity. However, spiritual influence cannot be ruled out in the process of constructing music. The mental activity is akin to the deployment of the intellect, while the spiritual influence could be as a result of a direct encounter or impartation by a spirit being through dream/vision as typified by two Nigerian performing artists, Majek Fashek and Victor Uwaifo, who are the foci of this study. Exploring the concept of esotericism with emphasis on music performance, this article contends that although music-making is a mental/creative activity, spiritual or extra-mental influences supervene, with particular reference to the lives and performance careers of the two selected African musicians/media celebrities from Benin City in Nigeria. In doing this, it uses historical-analytic, key informant interview (KII), and direct observation methods to critically reflect on how the supernatural influences their music-making activities.