Carole Levin

On her book Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Culture

Cover Interview of March 05, 2009

In a nutshell

Throughout history people have taken their dreams very seriously. Dreams themselves, and the way we interpret them, take us into the deepest part of our individual as well as cultural psyches. Dreams indicate to us the ways in which we are fundamentally the same as peoples of earlier times and also the ways in which we are deeply different. Dreams, and discussions of dreams, can give us information about the most significant issues of a historical period, especially the sites where religion and politics, as well as death and power, intersect. Popular literature and historical documents from early Renaissance England include a remarkable number of recorded dreams and a considerable discourse on their meanings. While some dreams are specific to their time period, others are timeless and universal. Dreaming the English Renaissance looks at theories about dreams in Renaissance England, actual dreams found in letters and diaries, and dreams as they are presented in histories, drama, and political tracts. There were recipes for avoiding nightmares and for having pleasant or exciting dreams. Some argued they could learn the future from their dreams, while others insisted that one’s dominant “humour”–what we today would consider personality type–caused the dreams one had. Dreams helped discover murderers, were sent as warnings to monarchs, and were often the heartbreaking experiences of those who had lost or would lose someone they deeply loved. Examining dreams in the English Renaissance allows us to know much more about what these people believed and what they valued.

history / europe / everyday existence / psychology / britain / 17th century / shakespeare william / symbols / dreams / elizabeth i /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009