Sensory Perception in Dante's Dreams and Visions
My thesis analyses Dante’s dreams and visions in the Vita nuova and the Commedia from a sensory-cognitive point of view, examining them as moments of privileged perception, when the sensations described appear not to correspond to perceptions necessitated by immediate external surroundings. While Dante’s dreams have been examined by scholars such as Dino Cervigni (Dante’s Poetry of Dreams 1986) and Guglielmo Barucci (‘Simile a quel che talvolta si sogna’: i sogni del Purgatorio dantesco 2012), to mention only a few, the novelty of my research lies in the methodological approach chosen. Drawing upon cognitive literary studies, the history of the senses, and the philosophy of mind, I focus not so much on decoding the meaning of dreams, but rather the purpose of the sensory and affective responses that dreams elicit from the pilgrim Dante and the readers of Dante’s poetry. The project looks at Dante’s representation of dreams and visions across his oeuvre, with the greatest emphasis on Purgatorio. The Introduction traces the development of Dante’s visionary vocabulary in the early poetry and the Vita nuova. Chapter 1 looks at the depiction of visions in Purgatorio 15 and 17, the cantos that offer the most extensive explicit reflection on the so-called inner senses, thought to be crucial in the reception of dreams and visions. Finally, Chapters 2 and 3 offer a close analysis of Dante’s purgatorial dreams, showing how they question the dominant medieval discourses about rapture (Purgatorio 9) and sensory delight and pleasure (Purgatorio 19 and 27). While each chapter of my thesis takes an individual dream or a series of dreams as a starting point, further analysis reveals them to be representative of larger issues in the scholarship on medieval dreams and visions. These issues are explored by linking Dante’s writing to some of the most influential medieval visionary texts, such as Augustine's classification of visions in De genesi ad litteram, and Augustine’s and Thomas Aquinas’s theories of rapture. The project offers an extensive analysis of Dante’s visionary vocabulary, situating it within the developing Italian medieval dream vision tradition more generally. My work’s larger contribution to Italian and medieval studies consists in highlighting the key role of the multisensory in the ethics and aesthetics of Dante’s dreams and visions. I demonstrate that the representation of perceptual acts in Dante shows a greater synergy of the senses than has hitherto been accounted for in the scholarship, which has emphasised the primacy of vision and/or hearing in medieval Italian culture.
Dante, Senses, Medieval Literature, Multisensory Experience, Dreams, Visions, Italian Literature
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