Publisher's Synopsis
The ways to deal with dreams employed in early modern Romania are based on a fundamentally ambivalent attribution of their origin. In contrast to a modern hermeneutics of dreams characterized by romanticism and psychoanalysis, the sleeping subject is only one possible source of the dream among others. The hermeneutics to be applied in each case proves to be correspondingly complex; here, a knowledge of dreams reaching far back into antiquity is taken up again. Hermeneutics is complemented by a poetics of the dream, which in turn often takes up non-literary dream knowledge. Popular dream books constitute continuities far into the 19th century and thus into the pictorial and symbolic worlds of a modernity that is only too happy to conceal its early modern prerequisites. The contributions in this volume explore the dream culture of the early modern period on the basis of selected key texts from Romance literature.
