Divine Dreamwork: Cultivation of Visions by a Fourteenth‐century French Monk

How did medieval visionaries go about soliciting and acquiring knowledge from visions, as well as sharing, and interpreting them? This talk will explore some late medieval practices that facilitated visions, including prayers, visualizations, and cultivated dreaming, focusing on evidence from a book called The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching by a fourteenth-century Benedictine named John of Morigny. In this book, John traced his own acquisition of divine knowledge in both autobiographical prose and prayer. The book thus served as a kind of communal road map that allowed his visionary knowledge to be replicated, explored, and further developed by others.