OPEN LECTURE
22/05 at 18.00

Meghan Quinlan
“Dreams, Time, and History:  A dialogue between psychoanalysis and 12th-century dream theory via Michel de Certeau”

This lecture performs a dialogue between psychoanalysis and historiography by reading premodern and Freudian theories of dreaming as historiographical paradigms. Foregrounding the notion of time travel in these dream theories, it argues, with Michel de Certeau, that dreams and dreaming offer a model for the writing of history that takes into account the dual nature of interpretation: opening as well as delimiting the relationship between the historical researcher and their objects of study. In order to perform its own theory, putting the reader into contact with the strangeness of the past, I will juxtapose psychoanalytic approaches to dreams and time with medieval sources on the subject, focusing on twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources found in Roman collections. The talk expands ideas first put forth in my recent article, ‘History as Dreaming: Assembling Time’, available here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642529.2025.2499328#d1e522

Meghan Quinlan is trained as a musician, musicologist, and medievalist, holding a DPhil in medieval musicology from the University of Oxford. Her work in Rome focuses on the musical or sonic aspects of dream interpretation in medieval dreambooks, some of which are held at the Vatican Library. She is interested in how punning, mistranslation, and other continuities of sound inform the dream interpretations of these traditions, and how they relate to the ontologies of music and grammar contemporary with them.