Dream Cultures of the Italian Cinquecento

Girolamo Cardano’s Somniorum Synesiorum libri quatuor (1562) represent the most comprehensive and elaborate Renaissance contribution to dream theory. They should be considered from the perspective of the intellectual itinerary that led the author to engage in that adventure of the imagination and had included in its path, for instance, the editio princeps of Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica (Aldus 1518) and Agostino Nifo’s De insomniis (1521-22). As well as a philosophical background, the book presented clear connections with the medical discourse. Being the product of one of the Renaissance more extraordinary autobiographers, the text offers also the opportunity for extensive self-display and analysis. It can be read against the backgrounds of early modern developments (and late modern critical questioning) – among others – of notions of the self and of the relationship between individuals and communities; of the nature and reliability of the human faculties and of the senses and of ways of distinguishing between the real and deceit; of prophecy and divination in an era of profound religious reassessment of the correlation between God’s will and human destinies. All this not only provided material for intellectual debates but constituted a paramount dimension of personal experience and offered itself to the revisitation and representation in works of literature and the arts. According to current scholarship, the epoch staged at least some steps towards a paradigm shift, from a predominant association of dreams with the supernatural to their recontextualization in a family resemblance with disorders of the mind. What were then the most significant attitudes towards – and uses of – dreaming, dream recollection and narrative? Apart from scholarly debates, what did people suggest they dreamt? How, on what occasions and for what purposes did they talk about it? What were the interpretative frames they adopted in deciphering their meaning? If the proposed essay cannot be expected to answer all these questions adequately, it will aim at least at formulating them clearly in their interconnections, with the intention of further developing and applying to the Italian area of the long sixteenth century what in recent decades has proved, internationally, a highly innovative and productive stream of cultural historical research.