Introduction

While scholarly treatises on dreams were available for those with higher levels of literacy and the means to afford them, short dream interpretation manuals or "dreambooks" also circulated throughout the early modern period, being more accessible to a broader readership. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines and explores the three broad cultural lens-health, prediction and spirituality-used to understand the dream. Two approaches have dominated histories of dreams. First, historians have typically examined the history of dreams working backwards from Freud and the foundation of psychoanalysis. Secondly, scholars have tended to use psychoanalytical tools to analyze past dream narratives. Two overarching questions focus the chapters of this: How did early modern English people understand their dreams and did these understandings change in response to significant events and developments in English history and culture?.