Drawing this study to a close, I would like to return briefly to “Vpon temse,” the short dream vision in Leiden, University Library Vossius Germ. Gall. Q.9, folio 112r, with which I began this book:

The word “venus,” as I argued in the Introduction, is crucial to understanding the poem's subject: the narrator assumes his narratee understands fully the reference; without it, the narratee (and we ourselves) would not necessarily know the poem is about love. This particular reference illustrates poetics and reading practices at the heart of medieval classicism. In naming the dream's central figure “venus,” the poet invites the poem's audience to read intertextually, which as Jo-Marie Claassen describes the practice is “a form of ‘literary anamnesis’”: a recollective interpretive exercise relying on previous reading experiences.

As with any first-person dream-vision narrative, readers base resulting interpretations of “Vpon temse” on an assumption about the narrator recollecting the dream event; that is, we assume the narrator is correct when naming the poem's female vision figure. This assumption leads to yet another fundamental question in this case: how did the dreamer-narrator know that this vision figure in the first stanza, whom he describes in the second stanza as holding a painting, was indeed Venus? This appearance of a female vision figure in “Vpon temse” joins, as we have seen, a long line of such appearances stretching back to biblical and classical texts. When considering visionary literature, though, we also note a trend in which narrators describe vision figures in some detail as well as, and often prior to, identifying the figure.