Classicism and Contemporaneity in Early Modern Dream Narratives

Among the literary forms that have emerged in the world of Renaissance-Humanism the so-called Somnia have proved particularly productive – literary fantasies in which a narrator, often himself engaged in the study and teaching of the great Classics of antiquity, tells the story of how he falls asleep and enters the realm of dreams where he encounters eminent figures of the past, among them the poets and writers who form the very object of his bookish studies.

The present paper will discuss prominent examples from this tradition – Vives’ Somnium et Vigilia (1521), Nannius’ Paralipomena Virgilii (1545), Lipsius’ Somnium (1581) – to shed light on the critical potential of these texts. The conceit of direct engagement not only with the writings but also with the writers of the past playfully undermines the pretense of the modern scholars and exposes their assumptions. As will be argued, the somnia tradition thus explores the idea of the ‘literary tradition’ in its entanglement with ‘contemporary literature’.

Prof. Dr. Cédric Scheidegger Lämmle is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Basel. His research focuses on classical Latin authors (from Cicero to Ovid), their reception in the early modern period, and contemporary perspectives on literary interpretation.