Dante's Poetry of Dreams

Abstract

To speak of dreams today is to conjure up one solitary name.Despite Freud's authority, interest in dreams, not unexpectedly though perhaps regrettably, has been pushed to the margins of our 'scientific' materialist culture.For the Middle Ages, however, absorbed in the lessons of the Biblical tradition and of antiquity, dreams and a general concern with the visionary were much closer to the heart of things.The centurieslong effort to explore reality in terms of the relationship between the human and the divine had firmly established that dreams-their nature, categories, and relationship to other forms of cognition and perception were far from unimportant in the search for 'spiritual' answers to existence.The roll of honour of auctoritates on this topic is impressive: Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, Macrobius, on the one hand; the Bible, Augustine, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, on the other.Nor did this fascination with dreams confine itself to the domains of philosophy and theology; it invaded other areas of intellectual life; enough to remember that quintessentially medieval literary form, the allegorical dream or vision poem, to which

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