Meghan Quinlan

Gihls Foundation’s scholarship

The genre of the dreambook, transmitted widely across late antique and medieval Europe, functioned as an interpretive encyclopaedia of dreams, listing dream motifs and their potential meanings. Dreambooks therefore offer a glimpse, filtered through generic and topical convention, into the ephemera of people’s daily lives—the ordinary objects they dreamed about—and the layers of tradition, cultural exchange, and learning governing their meaning.

My proposed project focuses on the mutability of sound and music in these dreambooks: for instance, on several cases of instrumental and natural sounds being interpreted as affect-laden words, and of objects and interpretations that are homonymous. It investigates the logic behind and transmission of these interpretations and considers them in the light of modern psychoanalytic and cultural theories on sound’s capacity to anchor associations, as well as the thin line between sound and sense, materiality and representation.

Since several of these manuscripts are in Rome, I am grateful for the chance to examine their prefaces and layouts to refine ideas about their transmission and readership. The texts they circulated with provide particularly valuable information on the latter. The study will be part of a larger book project on the history and aesthetics of dreaming.