“Pieter Bruegel and Carlo Ginzburg: The Debatable Land of Renaissance Dreams”

Abstract

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's pictures of witches and dreams are discussed in relation to Carlo Ginzburg's studies of the benandanti (do-gooders, good walkers) and the mythology of the witches' Sabbath. The shared context for these is dream-culture as a "debatable land" - a socially contested territory. The visions of the benandanti were based on traditional structures of dreaming and carnivalesque imagery; Bruegel's innovative visual rhetoric for this material demonstrates how these traditions about fantasy and the spirit world could decompose, condense and undergo category-shifts under the pressure of religious and cultural reformation; in the case of night-walking, effectively nocturnalisation and demonization. Ginzburg's account of these changes can be updated to consider them as part of a wider redefinition of dream-culture, carried out through the reconfiguration of composite motifs in existing traditions and templates for representing dreams and the folk imaginary in the Renaissance.

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