YEAGER'S FIRST PUBLICATIONS FOCUSED on Gower, and he has been devoted to Gower studies for his entire career. He helped to create and has served as President of the Gower Society since the early 1980s. It is not surprising that someone would devote his career largely to one figure, or that this devotion would develop into and create a scholarly topic for himself and generations of scholars to follow. I think, though, that Yeager's choice of Gower is telling. “John Gower (d. 1408) was, during his lifetime and into the Enlightenment, considered the father of English poetry … Gower invariably – and deservedly – appears alongside Chaucer in early laudatory accounts of the birth of English letters.” Gower is always, for modern readers, compared to Chaucer and, of course, in terms of his fame and influence, comes in second to Chaucer for most medievalists. His influence is great, but to the wider public he is virtually unknown. R.F. Yeager's research subject, starting in the 1970s, was not to take the more-travelled road of Chaucer studies but to focus on the until then less well-known, even less-translated and studied, John Gower, whose influence on later writers such as John Milton and Ben Jonson notwithstanding was nearly forgotten after the eighteenth century.

R.F. Yeager's influence on Gower studies cannot be understated: as Derek Pearsall says in his essay in this collection, “Bob Yeager … has ever been the friend of Gower studies, and without [him] Gower would still be a shadow at Chaucer's feast.” Yeager's publication history is a testimony to the growth of Gower studies in the years since he began his own work. The Bibliography of R.F. Yeager's Writings included in the endmatter of this volume (see pp. 229–36) shows the progress of the study of John Gower and Yeager's impact on it since the 1980s. In addition, Bob has been exceedingly generous to younger scholars of Medieval Studies and, especially, of Gower studies. A shared desire to pay warm tribute is at the heart of this collection. In it are essays written by authors with a variety of backgrounds and experience: Gower scholars who have been influenced by or been an influence upon R.F. Yeager's own work.

I HOLD A DISTINCTION in this collection, not only as its editor. I was also an undergraduate student of Bob Yeager's. I have known him for as long as I have known the Middle Ages, and in fact most of what I know I learned from him. He also taught me about pedagogy, literary theory, critical thinking, and, of course, writing.

I attended Warren Wilson College, near Asheville, NC, where Bob taught English in an all-male department with faculty who, for various reasons, had all attended or were otherwise connected with Yale. For a mediocre high school student arriving in a rural, tiny college in 1983, these five Yale men were incredibly intimidating. I learned so much from all of them, of course: one was a scholar of Romanticism, which became my secondary field in graduate school; one was a Shakespeare scholar (and an Episcopal priest) who influenced me deeply; one was a very laid-back modern poetry scholar who has, surprisingly, influenced my teaching more than almost anyone. Bob Yeager's influence, however, has continued since my undergraduate years, and this collection is dedicated, among other things, to his greatest gift: his ability to invest in the future of medieval scholarship, and his support of his students over the course of his career.

In his article about Beowulf for his collection (co-edited with Jess Bessinger), Approaches to Teaching Beowulf, part of the MLA Approaches Series, he explains the unique nature of Warren Wilson College and his own approach to teaching:

I try to tie cultural and environmental issues raised by the text to situations familiar to the students in their own lives … there is so much [at Warren Wilson] that illuminates certain passages of the poem. The river twisting through the pasture grows icicles in the winter; its banks hang hoary and dark with roots. By chance, there is a large Indian burial ground on campus under excavation … students work on the site and have helped unearth skeletons, jewelry, and spearpoints. A few black bears live yet in the mountains not far from Swannanoa, and deer and foxes are occasionally observed in the field. The woods at night are very dark and at times can feel quite wild. Since we slaughter our own cattle and pigs, many of the farm-crew students are familiar with floors awash with blood.

IN SHAKESPEARE's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom, upon awakening from his disturbing experience among the fairies, says, ‘I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. … The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’ (IV.i.209–10, 214–17). Bottom's lack of awareness about almost anything is comically apparent here, where he misidentifies the senses which, should they be applied to understanding his dream, would fail to comprehend it. In spite of its comic and confusing nature, this quotation works well to define, to some extent, what makes dreams and visions so very difficult to categorize and to recognize based on traditional methods. Dreams are complicated because they represent extensions of the unconscious, desires which make us uncomfortable when we are conscious and participating in our regular lives. Still, the wishes we fulfill in our dreams, however uncomfortable they may make us feel when we dream them, are genuine to some extent, in spite of, as Freud writes, their ‘strangeness and obscurity’.

In medieval literature, the genre of the dream vision is wrapped up closely with that of mysticism because both deal with experiences which occur outside of human consciousness. Most scholars who address these two genres see them separately. Mysticism, for example, is seen by most who study it as a physical (or at least sensual) phenomenon, based on a specific experience of transcendence, and experienced differently based on a mystic’s gender and social role. Traditional definitions of mysticism generally view it as a process that is achieved through successful completion of either the via negativa or what has become known as the via mystica, a three-tiered process combining prayer, contemplation, and meditation.