Abstract
This study discusses the phenomenon of medieval sleepwalking as a disorder of body and soul. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, medical and natural philosophical writers began to identify the category of the sleepwalker with unusual precision: the most common example of the disorder involved an aristocrat who rose, armed himself, and mounted his horse, all the while imagining that he was fighting enemies or hunting deer. Explanations for this extraordinary behaviour involved the physiology of sleep and the functioning of the brain. In particular, theorists believed that the imagination, a storehouse of images located towards the front of the brain, took control because reason and sensation had been disabled during sleep. As a consequence, daytime fears and traumas could come to the fore for some sleepers, causing them to act and react in their sleep in ways they could not, or were not willing to do, in their waking, rational state. As such, medieval medical writers viewed sleepwalking as a dangerous, disordered state which called into question the Aristotelian divide between waking and sleeping as well as the categories of reason, sensation and voluntary motion.
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Notes
See Creutz (1936), aphorism 41, Vi animae vel consuetudine seu compassione in sompnis, fantasiae diversificantur, pp. 74–84.
There is next to nothing on medieval sleep, despite a large literature on dreams, mostly written by literary scholars, with the exception of Hergemöller (2002).
For an overview of sleep in regimen literature, see Arnau (1996), ch. 4, La higiene del sueño.
The thirteenth-century encyclopedist Bartholomaeus Anglicus provides a summary of the scholastic viewpoint circa 1230, including references to Aristotle, Augustine, Avicenna and Constantinus Africanus (the Pantegni). See Bartholomaeus (1601), 6.24, De somno, pp. 266–269.
Drossaart Lulofs (1943) includes the two main medieval translations of De somno. Most commentaries on De somno remain unpublished; see the discussion below for Albert the Great, Averroes and Siger de Brabant’s commentaries.
Creutz (1936), p. 84 on ‘comissationi et ebrietati intendentes… cibis ymaginatione praesentatis dormiendo malam et os movet in tantum, ut modus commasticationis stridore dentium cognascatur’.
Urso and the Prose Salernitan Questions mention rising, arming and occasionally mounting a horse; Bernard de Gordon mentions the desire to hunt deer. In my favourite example illustraing the danger of homonyms, the 1496 edition mistakenly replaces the word cervum [deer] with the word servum [a servant or serf]! The two words would not have been homonyms in Italian or German, but the edition was published in Lyons, where it was possible to conflate the two words.
Albertus (1890), 9.145a, De somno et vigilia 1.2.5: Tamen in somno quidam moventur et faciunt multa opera quae sunt vigilantium, sicut est ambulare et equitare, et aliquando quaerere et insequi inimicos, et forte occidere eosdem, et redire ad lectum dormientes.
Bernard (1496), fol. 68ra: et ideo malum est in vna aula cum talibus socijs habitare.
Albertus (1890), 9.145a: De somno et vigilia, 1.2.5: Et vidi ego et audivi quemdam hoc facientem, qui interrogatus elevavit se in lecto, et respondit ad interrogata quaerentibus et reposuit se, illis dimissis, et continue dormivit, dum hoc faceret.
Peter of Abano (1483), differentia 157 [unpaginated, final page of differentia]: cum videamus aliquos de lectibus surgere seque armantes quandoque procedere aut huiusmodi peragere et maxime quorum cerebrum est calidum et siccum.
Creutz (1936), p. 41, p. 83: Ad ea ymaginanda dormiens animal magis inclinatur, in quibus tota mentis intentione insudare consuevit.
Vincent of Beauvais (1624), Speculum naturale, book 26, quotes from Albert’s Summa de creaturis, stripped of its scholastic format by reducing the quotations to only the solutiones.
Taddeo (1527), fol. 262rb: sed vadunt propter consuetudinem sicut magister compagus cecus qui vadit propter consuetudinem per bononiam transeundo vias sine aliquo socio.
Creutz (1936), p. 84: Inde est quod aliquis quandoque aliquid conspicit, quod ipse habere desiderat, quod sciendo dum habere non potest, ad eius desiderium sollicitiori intentione movetur. Unde anima in somnis virtutem ymaginariam excitat ad appetitae rei formam animali monstrandam.’.
Bernard (1496), fol. 68ra: Aliquando vadunt per loca inuia, ita quod in tempore vigiliarum nullomodo auderent vel possent transire.
Peter of Abano (1482), part. 8, prob. 8.
See especially the introduction to Lemay (1992).
The use of whips appears again in Bernard’s discussion of nocturnal emissions, in this instance to restrain or distract the mind from sexual thoughts during sleep. See Bernard (1496), 7.4, De pollutione nocturna, fol. 205vb. I am in the process of studying this material as part of my larger project on medieval medicine and sleep.
See Elliott (1999), chap. 1 and the earlier note about my future work on this topic. In many ways, nocturnal pollution was very similar to sleepwalking, although the sources never link the two. In part this is due to the medical literature’s general organisation of diseases from head to toe: sleepwalking was a disease of the head, while nocturnal pollution was seen as a disease of the genitals.
Bernard (1496), fol. 68ra: ‘multa somnia et fantasmata videre sine capite et caude… ideo ex hoc sumus secundum Aui vj de naturalibus in continuo cruciatu.’ The passage is derived loosely from Aristotle’s De anima, 4.2, dealing with the virtus imaginativa. See Avicenna (1968), pp. 20–22.
This passage has parallels to Aristotle’s treatise on dreams. For the medieval Latin translations, see Drossaart Lulofs (1947).
Bernard (1496), fol. 68a: et multa somnia et fantasmata videre sine capite et caude. The final phrase could equally in a less literal translation suggest that the number of the phantasms is endless, without beginning (head) or end (tail).
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MacLehose, W. Sleepwalking, Violence and Desire in the Middle Ages. Cult Med Psychiatry 37, 601–624 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-013-9344-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-013-9344-9