This book undertakes an original and fascinating project: a survey of dreams – defined as ‘experiences linked with sleep which do not appear to be the products of waking minds’ (p. 4) – in early modern England. Carole Levin, Professor of History at the University of Nebraska and author of Heart and stomach of a king: Elizabeth I and the politics of sex and power, writes that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England constituted a ‘fault line between medieval and modern’, and suggests that people's dreams in this period offer insight into the evolution of modern interiority (p. 8).

Chapter One focuses on the role of dreams at the royal court. It highlights three ‘experiences linked with sleep’ from 1605, the second year of James I's reign and the year of the Gunpowder Plot. These include a dream of Robert Wintour, one of the Gunpowder conspirators; the eloquent sermons of the preacher Richard Haydock, apparently delivered while he was sound asleep; and a series of dreams that solved a murder. Chapter Two explores contemporary beliefs about the mechanics and interpretation of dreams. Thomas Nashe, for example, thought that feelings of guilt over bad acts committed while awake caused dreams. For Thomas Browne, by contrast, dreams were a form of communication with God as well as the result of astrological influences. Others believed that dreams allowed one to speak with the dead. Those unsure about which interpretation to choose could consult professional astrologers, who gave advice about dreams. In Chapter Three, Levin discusses how dreams were used in the era's religious struggles. Foxe's Book of Martyrs made propaganda of the dreams of Protestant martyrs; Catholic martyrologists recounted the dreams of executed Catholics to show that God had comforted them at their deaths. People dreamt of Christ and angels, but feared deceptive or defiling dreams sent by the devil. Chapters 4 and 5 return to the court, showing how dreams were interwoven in the Tudors' rise and in resistance to their power. Levin's recounting of dreams familiar to most scholars of the period is less interesting than her probing of the less well-known dreams of ordinary people. For example, her discussions of the dreams of the Duke of Gloucester and his wife in Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2 and of Richard III's dreams before his defeat at Bosworth, reported by both Holinshed and Shakespeare, supply no new insight.

Unfortunately, Levin often fails to offer sufficient analysis of her fascinating examples. For instance, she concludes that the time and energy that James I expended to expose Haydock, the sleeping preacher, ‘say a great deal about the nature of his kingship’ (p. 19) but she never explains what that ‘great deal’ is. At the least, probing James's fascination with uncovering the truth about supernatural events might have developed Jonathan Goldberg's analysis of Jacobean kingship, which shows how James portrayed himself as a central, all-seeing, yet invisible, power (see Goldberg's 1989 James I and the politics of literature). Similarly unsatisfying is Levin's discussion of Reginald Scott, author of a tract debunking witchcraft, who mocked old women who confessed to having committed supernatural acts as having been merely dreaming, ‘at home fast asleep’. Intriguingly, Scott used dreams as a way to trivialize the idea of female power, arguably paralleling King James's similar ‘debunking’ efforts. Given Diane Purkiss's important point that witchcraft sceptics can be read – counterintutively – as propounding an antifeminist agenda, the question arises whether gender played a role in this period's treatment of dreams. (See Purkiss's The witch in history: early modern and twentieth-century representations, of 1996.) Were women's dreams taken less seriously than those of men, for example? Levin, however, does not pursue this inquiry.

Overall, Levin fails to move beyond general statements such as that a ‘wide range of beliefs in dreams and their meanings permeated the lives of the people of early modern England’ (p. 32). One root of the problem may be the subject matter: perhaps it is anachronistic to categorize dreams in this period as a single genre, the way that Freud has taught us to do. For example, is Richard III's dream on the eve of Bosworth really commensurate with a commoner's dream that his neighbour killed his wife? Or should we see them as embedded in separate narratives, one about Tudor rule and the other about society and crime? This book suggests such questions but could have done more to point us to answers.