ABSTRACT
During the seventeenth century several writers contested belief in prognostic dreams in response to the increasingly public profile of sectarian visionaries and the growing popularity of handbooks of divination. In his correspondence with Hartlib and others John Beale asserted that divine dreams continued and although one should be cautious of ascribing meaning to natural dreams, God continued to send these "nocturnal whispers of the Allmighty". First emerging in the late sixteenth, theories and practices of dream divination and spiritual visions were subjected to an onslaught by a number of English authors concerned with the rise of irreligion, superstition and increasing challenges to the social and religious order. After 1650, writers such as Henry More, Meric Causabon and John Spencer argued that visionaries were suffering, not from divine inspiration, but rather from a form of "religious enthusiasm" or melancholic madness. Finally, the legacy of the Protestant Reformation was to fundamentally reinscribe the dream within a thoroughly Protestant discourse.
