NTU DFLL Faculty Colloquium
臺大外文系學術演講
Title: Awakening to the Past: Medieval Dreams, Then and Now
Speaker: Dr Boyda Johnstone (Borough of Manhattan Community College)
Moderator: Dr Sophia Ya-Shih Liu (National Taiwan University)
Time: 16:30-18:00, December 10, 2025
Venue: NTU Humanities Hall, B208 (臺大人文館B208室)
Abstract: In the late Middle Ages in England, along with an overall rise in access to books and ideas with the commercialization of scriptoria and literary patronage systems, and as individuals became increasingly disenchanted with the church and state, poets and laypeople found refuge in dreams. Poems were produced experimenting with the nature of knowledge and critical inquiry couched in the form of a dream vision, and popular manuals circulated offering glossaries for interpreting dreams. This talk will give an overview of oneiric practices and materials from this period in England, and offer some developing theories about why dreams were (and are) such a rich vehicle for experimentation and openness. Taking Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls as a case study, I will delineate some key differences between how dreams were perceived then and how they are understood now, in the modern era. In the final section of the talk, I will analyze a Victorian artifact that takes on the medieval dream vision form, William Morris’s The Dream of John Ball (1888), which speaks both to the projected future of its time of production and the future of a medieval past that never was.
Speaker bio: Boyda Johnstone received her PhD from Fordham University in New York in 2017. She is Associate Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York system, and her articles have appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Medieval Feminist Forum, and New Medieval Literatures. Her current book project, “Falling Awake: Visionary Politics in Late Medieval Literature,” analyzes the revolutionary potential of dreams as a means of accessing difference and taking on uncertainty and instability as a relative strength.
