A01=Patricia Cox Miller
Aelius Aristides
Allegory
Anecdote
Apuleius
Artemidorus
Asceticism
Asclepius
Author_Patricia Cox Miller
Category=JBCC
Category=NHB
Category=NHC
Category=NHTB
Category=VXN
Christian theology
Christianity
Clement of Alexandria
Consciousness
Disease
Divination
Dream interpretation
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Eustochium
Evocation
Explanation
Feeling
God
Greek Magical Papyri
Gregory of Nyssa
Handbook
Hermeneutics
Homer
Imagery
Imagination
Indication (medicine)
Irony
Late Antiquity
Leitmotif
Literature
Martyr
Masculinity
Metaphor
Mithraism
Narrative
Neoplatonism
Oracle
Parable
Phenomenon
Philosopher
Philostratus
Physiognomy
Poetry
Polytheism
Potion
Precognition
Prediction
Religion
Religious text
Rhetoric
Rite
Self-concept
Sensibility
Suffering
Suggestion
Synesius
Syracuse University
Tertullian
The Other Hand
The Various
Theology
Theory
Thought
Treatise
Uncertainty
Understanding
Virginity
Vomiting
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691058351
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 11 Jan 1998
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Dream interpretation was a prominent feature of the intellectual and imaginative world of late antiquity, for martyrs and magicians, philosophers and theologians, polytheists and monotheists alike. Finding it difficult to account for the prevalence of dream-divination, modern scholarship has often condemned it as a cultural weakness, a mass lapse into mere superstition. In this book, Patricia Cox Miller draws on pagan, Jewish, and Christian sources and modern semiotic theory to demonstrate the integral importance of dreams in late-antique thought and life. She argues that Graeco-Roman dream literature functioned as a language of signs that formed a personal and cultural pattern of imagination and gave tangible substance to ideas such as time, cosmic history, and the self. Miller first discusses late-antique theories of dreaming, with emphasis on theological, philosophical, and hermeneutical methods of deciphering dreams as well as the practical uses of dreams, especially in magic and the cult of Asclepius. She then considers the cases of six Graeco-Roman dreamers: Hermas, Perpetua, Aelius Aristides, Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianus.
Her detailed readings illuminate the ways in which dreams provided solutions to ethical and religious problems, allowed for the reconfiguration of gender and identity, provided occasions for the articulation of ethical ideas, and altogether served as a means of making sense and order of the world.
Patricia Cox Miller is Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. She is the author of Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man.
