This volume shows how late medieval dream-poetry explored problems arising from the reception of Aristotle's philosophical work concerning human knowledge. Marco Nievergelt explores how the work of three medieval poets in the genre of allegorical fiction addressed these problems in distinctive, non-academic terms.

Marco Nievergelt studied at the Universities of Lausanne, Glasgow, and Oxford. His research interests lie in English and comparative literature, cultural history, and intellectual history in the late medieval period (c. 1200-1600). His research specializations include allegorical poetry, the relations between medieval literature and philosophy, chivalric literature and romance, Anglo-French cultural and literary relations, and medieval translation. He is currently a Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow at the EPHE/PSL in Paris, working on a research project on the Science, Philosophy, and Poetics of Experience in Late Medieval England (SPPELME). He has previously taught at the Universities of Warwick, Geneva, and Lausanne, and held fellowships from the Swiss Science Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

• Introduction


• I. Jean de Meun


• 1: In the Beginning was the Rose


• II. Deguileville


• Introduction to Part II


• 2: Language


• 3: Cognition: Theory and Practice


• 4: Experience


• III. Langland


• Introduction to Part III


• 5: The Desire for Knowledge and the Experience of Conversion


• 6: The Experience of Failure and the Architecture of Vision


• 7: The Ends of Experience: Incarnation and Apocalypse