William of Aragon on prognostication from dreams.
The influence of Achmet’s work is also seen in a treatise on the prognostication of dreams compiled by master William of Aragon.[945] It opens by referring to the labors in this art of the ancient philosophers of India, Persia, Egypt, and Greece, and later it cites Smarchas the Indian,[946] whom I take to be the same as the Strbachan of Achmet’s second chapter. William justifies writing his treatise by saying that while there may be many Dream-Books in existence already, they are mere Practice and without reason, while he intends to base the prediction of the future from dreams upon rational speculation, and to support his particular reasoning by specific examples.[947] He makes more use of Aristotle’s classification of dreams[948] than the anonymous work just considered, from which he further differs in dwelling more upon the connection of dreams with the constellations.[949] The second part of his treatise consists of twelve chapters devoted to the twelve astrological houses.[950] Earlier he mentions that at the nativity of Alexander an eagle with extended wings rested all day on the roof of the palace of his father Philip.[951] In stating the signification of various objects William has a chapter on what different parts of the human body signify when seen in dreams.[952] Like our previous works on divination from dreams, he lays considerable stress upon experience, illustrating his statement that dreams are often due to bodily ills by cases which “I have seen,”[953] and also asserting that it is shown by experience that dreams seen on the first four days of the week are most quickly fulfilled.[954]
Who was William of Aragon?
This William of Aragon is no doubt the same who commented upon the Centiloquium ascribed to Ptolemy.[955] From his medical experience and his tendency to give an astrological explanation for everything one is tempted to identify him further with the William Anglicus or William of Marseilles who wrote the treatise of astrological medicine entitled, Of Urine Unseen, in the year 1219, but it is of course unlikely that the same man would be called of Aragon as well as of England and Marseilles or that the words Anglicus and Aragonia should be confused by copyists.
His work formerly ascribed to Arnald of Villanova.
The treatise on dreams has been printed among the works of Arnald of Villanova,[956] a physician who interpreted dreams for the kings of Aragon and Sicily at the end of the thirteenth century, under the title Expositio (or, Expositiones) visionum quae fiunt in somniis.[957] The Histoire Littéraire de la France[958] has noted that in the manuscript copies the work was anonymous and not ascribed to Arnald, but I believe that I am the first to identify it with the work of William of Aragon.
Another anonymous work on dreams.
In the same manuscript with the Sompniale dilucidarium Pharaonis and the work of William of Aragon on dreams just described is another long anonymous work on the interpretation of dreams.[959] It makes the usual points that the meaning of dreams varies with times and persons. But the treatise consists chiefly[960] of a mass of significations which are not even arranged in alphabetical order, a failing which it is attempted to remedy by an alphabetical index at the close.[961]
[911] Cockayne, Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms, RS vol. 35, 1864-1866, III. x. The Ὀνειροκριτικά was printed by the Aldine press at Venice, 1518; a Latin translation by Cornarius appeared at Basel, 1539; it was published in both Latin and Greek by N. Rigaltius at Paris, 1603; the modern edition is by R. Hercher, Leipzig, 1864.
I have not seen P. Diepgen, Traum und Traumdeutung als medizinisch-naturwissenschaftliches Problem im Mittelalter, Berlin, 1912.