Bookish Brains and Visionary Learning in the Apocalypsis goliae episcopi

Abstract:Through a close examination of the Apocalypsis goliae episcopi ("The revelation of bishop Goliath"), this essay explores the limitations of human cognition in recording visionary experience. Scholars frequently look to visionary texts for imaginative reflections on the written conditions of memory and identity that characterize the fundamentally bookish cultures of the late Middle Ages. The Apocalypsis obsessively describes acts of inscription, announcing throughout its narrative an interest in the complex relationships that emerge between and among books, texts, authors, and readers. Turning on a provocative memorial metaphor--when the dreamer's angelic guide inscribes a record of the vision onto the physical matter of the dreamer's brain--the poem both performs and discloses a bifurcation central to all reading experience. At once parodic and sincere, the Apocalypsis suggests that the experience it describes, as with all visionary experience, is constituted by someone other than the dreamer of the dream.